Number two - You can hire a search engine specialist. They do exist and I have heard that some of them are very, very good. These high priest of search engine world can get you a nice high ranking and keep you there. I have also heard that their fees are very, very high. Of course, it may be worth money.

Number three - You can turn to pay-per-click type of search engine.

The frustration of trying to get a decent ranking on traditional engines has given rise to a new breed called pay-per-click. It only takes a few minutes to get listed on these guys. You open an account, make a deposit of from $10 to $25.00 ($50.00 is now required amount on GoTo.com) and then you list your keywords.

Your ranking under each keyword is determined by how much you are willing to bid on each listing (bids can be as low as 1 cent on most of these sites, 5 cents on GoTo.com).

The great part is you only pay for results. Plus, all of pay-per-clicks I have seen, have a members area where you can log in and check on amount of traffic each keyword is delivering to your site. If any of your keywords are not producing, just change it to what you think will be a better choice.

As you can see pay-per-clicks do cost a little money, but it is money spent on results, not on speculation. Here are URLs of a few you should check out if you are thinking about exploring this avenue.

http://www.GoTo.com http://PowerSearchExpress.com http://www.SearchFeed.com http://SearchHound.com

Regardless of what you decide to do about your quest for a high listing on search engines and to rid your life of those search engine blues, don't ignore them. They are too important to keep out of your marketing mix. If your decision is to keep on banging your head against "big boys," God love you, I admire tenacity. I just don't have time for it. But, let me know how you do.

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