Research has shown that as many as 5,000 new web sites come online every day!  With this flood of information, it's no wonder that virtually everyone begins their web surfing at one of the top 10 search engines.  In order for those who are interested in what you have to offer, your site must be listed in the top 20-30 results, or the reader will go to those that are.  A strong search position can mean thousands of visitors each month.

Today there are nearly 600 different search engines on the Net.  However, the primary search engines believed to be responsible for 95% of all traffic to Web sites are Yahoo!, Excite, InfoSeek, AltaVista, HotBot, Lycos, OpenText, WebCrawler, and AOL NetFind (actually Excite).  Northern Light is another up-and-comer that should be included in this group. It is important to submit web sites and new pages to each of these sites, and to know the specific indexing techniques each one uses for adding new sites.  These ``specific techniques" are where the art of web site positioning comes in, and there are a lot of variables.

There are also less desirable techniques that some sites use, including using sexual or suggestive words in meta tags or site descriptions, spamming key words,  and hiding key words in the design layout.  Such techniques are risky, since the search engines continuously weed out such deliberate misrepresentations, and may refuse to list pages or sites that abuse their indexing criteria.

Here are some other ideas that may help you improve your standing:

• Go to the sites that show up in the top of the lists and view the Source code for their pages.  If you read the HTML code from the top down through the opening text paragraph, you may notice some interesting tricks for how they got listed, as well as effective key words.  You can copy their technique for your own site.
• Use unique key words on the pages of your web site, so that each will be indexed according to content. Placing key words in the domain name, URL, opening paragraph and other places can help with most search engines.
• Read about web promotion tactics.  There is a free electronic book available from the Internet Marketing Library (http://www.foreverweb.com).  It's called Search Engine Tactics, which discusses web promotion tactics and gives advice on how to move your site up on the search engine results lists. 
• List your site yourself.  Software like Web Position (http://www.webposition.com)  and Dynamic Submission 2000 (http://www.datacomms.com) will submit your listing to 600 search engines in one step.  You just fill out a single form and the program does the rest.  The programs cost around $50-100.
• Use a submission service--for free or for a fee.  You can usually find a service to do submissions to all search engines for about $60.  Here are a few to check:

Register-it   http://www.register-it.com
Submit-It!   http://www.submit-it.com
Easy Submit   http://www.scrubtheweb.com/abs/submit/notes.html

Infoseek          1-2 days
AltaVista         2 days
HotBot            2 days
Lycos              2 weeks
Northern Light 2 weeks
Excite              2-3 weeks
WebCrawler    4-8 weeks
Yahoo             6-8 weeks

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