#3. Hire a professional. Unless you have time and talent to create a good site, leave it to a professional web designer. Preview their other sites before hiring them. (click here to view a $199 web site design special )

#4. Beware of mass real estate 'cookie-cutter' web site design packages. Although relatively low cost, many do not give you up-date control. Plus, except for a page or two of individualized pages, content of these sites are same for hundreds of your competitors. Your site will never stand out by going this route.

#5. Use tricks ISPs use. Try this: in your favorite browser, type in your URL domain name e. g., (http://www.websitetrafficbuilders.com) but, omit www. prefix! Could you access your site? If not, you probably received a "404 URL NOT FOUND" error message and this means you are losing potential traffic! Top Internet Service Providers (ISPs) program their servers to access sites without www. prefix. If you could not access your site with above test, a simple call to your ISP should resolve this immediately. © By Bob Schwartz, CRS, GRI co-owner of http://www.websitetrafficbuilders.com For other informative search engine articles, visit: http://www.websitetrafficbuilders.com

5) NORTHERN LIGHT: http://www.northernlight.com/docs/regurl_help.html

Still same after all these years. They won't ask for your money, but they also won't make it easy for you to find submission page either. Why they want to make it so difficult is beyond me; as a search engine you'd think they would want you to submit your website. Free if you can find it....I've made it easy for you.

6) LYCOS: http://home.lycos.com/addasite.html

Free to submit to but it can take up to 2 or 3 weeks for your URL to show up in their index. What do you expect for nothing?

7) YAHOO: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/

The king of directories no longer allows free submissions of commercial websites. Business Express listing is $199.00 with adult sites being charged a whopping $600.00 for same privilege. Sites are reviewed within seven days with no guarantee of a listing even after they've reviewed your site. So be prepared to lose your money if they don't feel your site is worthy enough to be listed in their superior directory.

8) INFOSPACE: http://www.infospace.com/info/submit.htm

Free to submit to but you'll need to fill out a pretty lengthy form to get listed. Infospace also borrows results from The Open Directory Project and Inktomi's database.

9) GOOGLE: http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Free to submit to with no guarantee of a listing. This is an important one as Yahoo pulls results from Google's directory as well as their own.

10) ASK JEEVES: mailto:url@askjeeves.com

This directory allows people to search by asking questions. Since it's backed by humans, you need to submit your site by email along with its URL and short description. Some suggest you also include a question that someone may type in when looking for a site like yours. No guarantee of a listing but definitely worth a shot due to Ask Jeeves' popularity.

So there you have it; top ten search engines and directories and their latest guidelines for submitting. By concentrating on getting your site listed with these major players you'll know your site is every- where it needs to be for optimum search engine traffic. Now getting it listed at top is a whole different story, and subject for another article.