Design your site as if it is a portal or search engine. Portals have dealt with huge volumes of traffic and have done their research. It's cheap way to do market research.... my college professor once told me that if I were to open a store.. choose a location right next to a new McDonald's. In order for McDonald's to be built a invest a serious amount of money for market research is spent.. how much traffic does street get.. how close is it to businesses (the people on their lunch break have very little time for lunch and have a tendency to eat fast food)

Trust me when I say that Yahoo or Altavista does their research. Their livelihood depends on how their visitor reacts to their site. They measure click through from main site to other areas.. they even measure spacing and fonts to make sure it appeals to their massive audience as well as design their site for least amount of bandwidth traffic. They don't want to slow down their site. So their site is VERY efficient.

Now as a small business owner you cannot go around and start paying every search engine that wants a hundred bucks or more just for privilege of listing your site (or just considering it!) So you have to concentrate your budget on just search engines that can deliver serious website traffic. Those are engines, or networks of engines with most traffic themselves.

After researching field, I've narrowed this down to just three that are undoubtedly worth price. They are...

8. Yahoo! Business Express http://help.yahoo.com/help/bizex/

Currently $199 for non-adult sites, Yahoo! still has busiest directory by far and you'll get lots of traffic from a decent listing.

9. The Looksmart Network's Express Submit http://submit.looksmart.com/

Also $199, this network powers over 1/2 million websites including AltaVista, CNN, Excite, iWon, Microsoft Network, Netscape Netcenter, NetZero and WebCrawler.

10. Inktomi's Search/Submit service www.networksolutions.com/catalog/searchsubmit/welcome.jhtml

At just $30 a year for first URL and $15 for each additional, this is a cheaper solution to Looksmart Network submission. Inktomi powers searches through AOL, iWon, MSN and Looksmart directory itself. The best part is that network updates every 48 hours so you get your listing in quickly.

OK, there you have it. A quick, cut to chase, search engine submission guide. Just be sure that before you submit your site to ANY search engine or network that your site is ready to be listed favorably. This means adding targeted keywords to your content, META tags and title as well as spell checking and browser checking your site. Once you are sure everything is set to go, visit those 10 URLs and submit your site!