GETTING LISTED ON THE SEARCH ENGINES

* Words are Key
The best way to improve your odds of getting listed--and highly ranked--on any search engine or directory is to use the right words. 
With directories, those words include choosing the proper category where your site should be listed, and making sure that your pages are interesting enough to catch the editor's eye. Creativity can be the key to getting a good directory listing. 
You need to be creative in a different way to attract a search engine's attention. Search engine spiders sort and rank sites using "keywords"--terms that they think describe the content on your site. These keywords can be located in one or more places on your page: the title, the first few paragraphs of text, and inside Meta tags on your pages. Not all search engines look for keywords in all those places, however. And some weight words in different places higher than in other places. (Infoseek boosts rankings if keywords appear in Meta tags, for instance.) 
Every search engine handles indexing in a different way. So a page that AltaVista puts on top of the heap might end up in the middle of the pack on Excite or HotBot. But here are a few good all-around tips: 

Use Meta tags (<META name="keywords" content="lens, camera, film, Nikon, Kodak">) and list common words that apply to your site in the content section. And use them on all of your pages. 

Put relevant titles on your pages (Art's Insurance: Auto, Home, Life, for instance). Not every search engine looks at titles, but some do, and many people forget to use them. 

Fill your pages with good content. Some search engines rank long pages filled with relevant keywords higher than shorter pages, based on the (sometimes incorrect) assumption that longer pages probably have more information. 

Ask other sites to include a link to your site (perhaps by offering to do the same for them). Several engines (including AltaVista and Excite) promote "popular" sites further up their lists. And they measure popularity by how many other sites have links to yours. 

* Money Talks
Every time someone click's on that link, it's money out of your pocket. And it may be hard to judge how many people will visit your site for each sale you make. 

* Don't Make Them Angry
There are myriad ways to get your site listed on a search engine. And there are nearly as many ways to get yourself 'unlisted', if you're not careful. 
AAA Plumbing. 123 Housecleaning. Businesses have used tricks like those to put themselves up front in the phone book, so it's not surprising that companies would try to do the same thing with search engines. Adding lots of keywords, filling pages with "invisible" (the same color as the background) type to make pages appear longer, or by using popular keywords that don't have anything to do with their site's content - all are tricks that have been used to some success over the past few years. 
Those tricks worked well in the early days of the Web, but search engines have gotten a lot smarter. If a engine notices that you're trying to stack the deck (and they do try to notice), it might remove your URL--permanently. And, even if you don't get de-listed, you'll still probably end up in a war of search engine one-upmanship with competitors who use the same techniques. Unless you like to spend lots of time tweaking your pages to trick the engines, it's best to stay aboveboard and spend time on other promotions and taking care of your customers. 
It's also possible to have your site removed, even if you haven't tried to be sneaky. Most engines re-check their URLs every so often to weed out dead links. If your site happened to be down (maybe because of a problem at your Web host) at the moment the engine stopped by, your site could be taken off the list, forcing you to start over again by re-submitting. For that reason, even after you're listed, it pays to check for your URL on the various search engines every so often, just to make sure you're still there. Being listed may not be a guarantee of success. But not being listed can sure help you fail.

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