There is a relationship between search results in "engine" and directory or directories that are associated with a particular search engine. It appears that many search engine's algorithms have been set to include results based on directory. Therefore, it is imperative that you are listed in directory associated with each search engine.

C. What happens when I submit my site to a search engine?

First, search engine's spider will visit your site immediately, and schedule your site for inclusion in search engine's index.

Second, usually within a few weeks, engine will place your site in their index.

Third, spider will revisit your site, to include any updates. Once you are included in index, spider will usually revisit every two weeks. The spider will also begin to "crawl" your site by following links off of page that you submitted. This process is also called "automatic update". With Excite - these new updates seem to be automatically included once spider has visited site. However, if you are dealing with Inktomi spider - slurp - which gathers data for Hotbot, Snap, Yahoo! and others, this information may not be included in each particular engine's index for several weeks.

Fourth, when someone uses a search engine, they type "keywords" into search box. They are submitting a query to a search engine. The search engine, depending on how it has been tuned, will pull up all of relevant sites which pertain to that query.

D. Variables That Affect Ranks

When you are optimizing your web pages for certain engines, you must always keep in mind that keyword frequency in text and location of your keywords, is most important part of how engine will rank your pages. ALL search engines rank pages based on frequency and location of keywords.

Some engines also are programmed to give a boost to pages which meet following criteria:

1. link popularity

2. keywords in title, most important keywords first

3. keywords in names of linked pages for instance: educational toys

4. keywords in alt tags

5. keywords as names of images for instance:

6. keywords in description tag

7. keywords in keywords tag, most important keywords first

Netscape http://home.netscape.com/escapes/search/addsite.html

Northern Light http://www.northernlight.com/docs/regurl_help.html

Open Directory Project (DMOZ) http://dmoz.org/add.html

Scrub The Web http://www.scrubtheweb.com/addurl.html

Yahoo! http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/

Note: many of above sites have regional versions that may well be more appropriate for your site.

=> THEN MONITOR RESULTS!

Only resubmit your website to search engines if it has not been added to specific search engine or directory. So how do you know if your site has been added? Well, you can visit each site above and search for your URL (e.g. do a search for www.yourwebsitename.com).

Or you could use following position checking tools, and see how your site ranks for keyword of 'www.yourwebsitename.com'

- http://www.jimtools.com/position2.html

- http://www.sethi.org ools/eyespy/

- http://www.did-it.com/detective.htm

Any results not in top 50 suggest your site has not yet been added to search engine's database yet.

=> EVEN DO IT YOURSELF!

For programmers out there, you might like to create your own site submission and position checking tools. The best place to find such resources is http://www.cgi-resources.com

=> READ MORE...

You can find out a great deal more about search engine submission from following excellent resources. Just do a search for "search engine submission" and off you go! (You can also find out more about paid search engine submissions here too.)

http://www.promotionbase.com http://www.iboost.com http://www.dmoz.org

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Search engines are a great way of getting traffic to your site. More and more search engines are now charging to be listed, though, so it makes it more important than ever that you create great content and choose keywords, meta tags etc. carefully.