How to Get Your Site Seen by Search Engines

Since search engines are the driving force behind 84% of internet traffic, getting your site seen by the search engines is important.  You want to make sure you show up on at least the top two pages of searches for your keywords and, preferably, the first page.  Google has the lion's share of all searches (55-65%), while Yahoo and Bing get around 10-15% each. 

But, how are search engines reading your sites?  There are two ways: spiders (automatically "crawl" websites on the internet) and directories (human-edited).  The search engine spiders automatically go through website pages and determine your "expertise" based on the text both on the page and in the meta tags.  Adding your keywords a few times sprinkled throughout the text on your page will increase your chances of a higher ranking.  However, don't think that just jamming your page with keywords will guarantee you a spot at the top.  You need to focus on a couple of keywords and sprinkle them as often as is naturally possible throughout the page.  Anything extra or forced will make your site appear "spammy" and get penalized as such.  Also, you don't want to lose the attention of your website visitor by making the text hard to read.

There are many human-edited directories on the internet, but they are becoming more and more scarce.  If you think about the fact that these directories actually have people that go through every site on the internet to make sure it is valid, you can see why more and more are going the automated route.  DMOZ and Yahoo are just a couple of the free ones left.  But, it can take months to get your site edited and added to their directory.  And Yahoo Directory has started charging a fee for a business site to be included in their directory.

Once you have your pages streamlined to a few natural uses of the keywords you want to focus on and have added these keywords into your meta tags, you are going to want to submit your site to directories to be considered for inclusion.  There are tons of directories out there that still do this for free.  You just have to be patient with their turnaround time.  The three most important directories to submit your site to are:

Google - http://www.google.com/addurl/
Yahoo! - http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
Bing - http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx

This should get you pointed in the right direction to start your search engine optimization.  If you have any questions, please contact me and I'll be happy to help you out.