In a word, YES.
Despite what you’ve heard, websites still need to be registered. I don’t know how many times I’ve said this to a client.
Trusted links from human-reviewed directories or domain verified listings are very useful to bots. They show you’re trustworthy, real, and provide uniquely useful meta-information to the search engines about your site.
Aside from registering with search engines with a sitemap in their respective webmaster tools areas – which are presently called Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer, and Bing Toolbox – there are still good directories to register with if you can. The ODP, the Yahoo! Directory, Best of the Web and 30 or 40 others.
Plus, Claiming your website at Alexa, and the AboutUs Wiki helps search engines categorize you.
If you’re an information only site, you really ought to be in the IPL2, and you are supposed to be able to submit to the Yahoo! Directory for free – although I’ve never seen that link work.
If you’re a B2B site, there’s a list I put together of good places to register a business to business site.
Additionally, if you’re a shopping search engine, there are a handful of places where you can register your product feeds, such as Google Product Search (Google Base), Yahoo Shopping Product Submit (PriceGrabber), Bing Shopping (Microsoft Advertising), and a half dozen more like Shopping.com .
And then of course if you’re a local business, operating only in a specific geographic zone, a world of opportunities opens up on where to register. Facebook Places registration, Google Places, Yahoo Local, Bing Local, etc.
If you have a lot of video content, there are other places to register you that will also help your rank and get the word out. For instance video sitemaps at Google.
For the journalistic, there are dozens of can’t-miss places to register a blog. Not to mention registering with everyone in your ping list.
I could go on and on.
Social media gets a lot of buzz, and can take a lot of time to manage, or can backfire badly if done anti-socially. But if you haven’t claimed your business listing at linkedin and yelp, updated your Google Sidewiki, crated a facebook business account, and started tweeting, you’re missing out on an opportunity to connect with your customers, personalize their experience, and prospect from an interested public in real time.
Aside from the benefit that comes from showing up in specialized search, each of these helps your search engine ranking and helps you bring in visitors from more and varied locations.
I just don’t understand why people stopped trying to do all the hard work once the search engines got better at finding you right away. Just because you’re in the index doesn’t mean you’re acing it.