There are a great number of search engines around, but only top 15 or so really generate serious traffic for most sites. Many of lesser search engines are 'meta search' types, meaning they actually get their results from bigger engines anyway.

Of main engines, there are two categories - Directory based, and Spidered based. The Directory based (which includes Yahoo, Looksmart and Open Directory Project) are generally added by hand. This means an editor for chosen category looks at your site and awards it a position (or not) based on how he/she rated it. The Spider index types, (including Lycos, Inktomi and AltaVista) use robot browsers to check and index sites based on pre-programmed criteria.

In general, to get a good listing in Directory engines means you must impress editor with look, ease of navigation and content of your site. Make sure your first page loads very quickly (empty your browser cache before checking) as this is an important factor. If your 'front' page doesn't open within 10 - 15 seconds you will not get a high placement. If need be, create a simple 'Welcome' page that opens quickly and use it as a front door to your site with more graphic laden pages with in it.

With Directory engines, if you have midis on your page be sure you include an "off " control. You will be penalized if not. Don't over do images or clutter - editors read hundreds of these sites a day and will be likely to have a lot in queue behind you. They want to judge your site rather than your taste in art or cartoons and music selections.

Spider based engines are more predictable. Spiders scan your pages looking for your keywords, count number of times keyword occurs through out that page, and measure it against overall length of your text to calculate how relevant your site is to keyword.

Your keywords need to be set in keywords meta tag, and should also be included in your description, and to occur AT LEAST once in first 200 characters of text in your page. For this reason it is wise to not try to target too many keywords on a single page, try to pick simple word-pairs. Make sure you pick phrases or words that you will repeat several times in actual text of your page and that they describe your site to a viewer not to a robot.

For same reasons of relevance to keywords, try to stick to one specific topic per page. If you deal with two different topics then you risk chance of only 50% of page being deemed relevant to either topic.

Assuming your site is now optimized to be rated by engines you need to start submitting. There are some tricks to this too. Firstly, submitting to FFA (Free For All) Links pages is a good idea. Most spiders will place your site far more highly if they have found lots of other sites linking to you. Once you submit to any Spidered Search Engine you should add your site to as many FFA pages as you can find, once per day, for about two weeks. You will get a lot of junk mail in response to these submissions - one from each site generally, but most have exactly same text in them so you can set your mail program to automatically delete them by using filter settings.

The best value listings of all are Inktomi database. Those used by Yahoo, Hotbot, ICQit and many others, and ODP (Open Directory Project) which is used by a list of Engines too long to even consider listing. Getting into ODP database is now only way to get listed in AOL net search. AOL use spiders to index sites found in ODP directory so you can see why it would be so important to be listed.

Top Five Directory Databases (1) Open Directory (2) Snap (3) Yahoo! Web Sites (Inktomi) (4) Yahoo! Directory (5) LookSmart

Normally, you will submit to these directories one time for a given web site. It is extremely important that you submit to them correctly first time and choose very best category. Be aware that it's often difficult to get a directory to change your listing later unless you send them a letter of explanation.

Here's where it gets complicated: Submitting to (6) HotBot (an engine) - will get you listed in all Inktomi based engines.

(7) Netscape: Netscape draws its results from Open Directory first. If no matches are found there, then it searches (8) Google. Therefore, we submit to Open Directory (a directory) and Google (an engine) to become listed on Netscape.

(9) AOL Search: AOL will search Open Directory listings first. After those matches are displayed, it will then draw results from Inktomi. Again, we submit to Open Directory using our directory guide, and to HotBot to be fully listed in AOL Search.

(10) Magellan: By submitting to Excite will get you listed here.

Many webmasters avoid these pay-for-inclusion engines for fear that they will waste money and not get any results. If you use these engines and directories correctly, you can be sure that you will profit from their use. It is highly recommended that you do list with pay-for-inclusion engines - it's one of best, most guaranteed way to get traffic fast and profit from it.

To start with, you need to collect and calculate following values for your web site:

1. Unique visitors per month. How many unique people visit your web site (not hits or page-views)? You need a log file analysis tool or similar tool to be able to get this figure. You can use Hitbox.com or WebTrendsLive.com free.

2. Total gross profit per month in US$. This is total sales of all your products in a month, minus what those products cost you. For example, if you sell tables for $100 a table, and table costs you $60 to make, and you sell 30 tables a month, figure you should enter here is (100 - 60) x 30= 1200. Have your monthly average total gross (not net) profit for your business for all products and services you sell.

3. Number of unit sales per month. How many items or services do you sell in a month? This is total number of items or services you sell in a month.

4. Average gross profit per unit, which is calculated as monthly gross profit divide by monthly unit sales.

5. Conversion ratio, calculated as monthly unit sales divided by monthly unique visitors. It is very important to have a high conversion ratio. The conversion ratio is a measure of how many of your unique visitors actually turn into buying visitors. You should try to increase your conversion ratio using various marketing techniques on your site and products. A higher conversion ratio will mean that you get a higher return on your advertising dollars. It also means you can spend more on advertising and advertise more times, resulting in a cycle of increasing profitability.

Now, let us use these values to get sure profits through Google, Goto.com and DirectHit/AskJeeves. You can use software such as PositionWeaver PRO (www.positionweaver.com) to manage all your calculations and keywords and all, or you can do it manually using a calculator and some way of keeping records. Remember, following calculations tell you when you will be making a gross (not net) profit on your using engines.

Google.com

Google.com is one of largest and most used engines today. They now offer their AdWords program at https://adwords.google.com/AdWords/Welcome.html. Your AdWords text ads appear on search result pages for keywords you buy, and can be targeted by language and country. Pricing for AdWords is based on position in which they're shown. Google positions your ad based on how many users click on it over time. Current rates are $15, $12 and $10 (per thousand ads shown) for positions 1, 2, and 3 respectively, and $8 per thousand for positions 4 through 8. Accounts are opened with a credit card and no minimum deposit is required.

The trick is to choose very targeted keywords that will trigger your ad. Which means that only very targeted buyers will ever see your ad and your conversion ration will be incredibly high. If your keywords are not well selected, you will end up having your ad showing often but with very few people clicking on it. And because Google charges you for ad displays and not click throughs, you will be loosing money. You can set how much you wish to spend. Google takes money out of your credit card after it reaches $50, by which time your ad will have been displayed roughly about 5,000 times! If your keywords are highly targeted, many of people who see your ad will instantly become buyers and you will actually get your money in before you even pay Google! Your listing shows up in about an hour of your creating it.

It is more effective to have about 20 or more keywords/phrases you are targeting, specific and related to your site, than it is to have just one, so come up with 20 or more very specific and targeted keywords/phrases if you really want to win this game hands down.

Google allows you to create campaigns. A campaign holds its own keywords and adverts. Each campaign has its own statistics that are reported to you. The best strategy to use is to create a separate campaign for each keyword and each advert, rather than put all your ads and keywords into one campaign. That way, you will easily be able to tell which keywords and ads are doing well and which ones are not so that you can eliminate those that are wasting your money.

You should also ensure that for each ad you create for a particular keyword or phrase, that keyword or phrase appears in both title and description on that ad. Click through rations can be significantly improved when you have keyword being searched for included in title and description of ad.

Once you start advertising on Google, Google will give you reports showing how your ads are doing. From reports, take average amount of money in dollars you are paying for every 1,000 impressions/displays of your advert (this is called CPM or cost per 1000), which varies depending on positions your ad gets, and refer to conversion ratio and gross unit profit figures you calculated earlier for your web site. Now, in that Google report, you will also be told what click throughs you are getting for your ads, in other words, what percentage of times your ad is show does someone click on it.