In an effort to beat each other for number one position, each of big three search engines is changing its search engine model or changing its site.

THE SCOOP

In number three position is Google. In their bid to compete, they have changed their model from just a search engine to becoming a world class portal. Adding services like free email and groups, as well as offering a free blog at Blogger, http://www.blogger.com, Google is seeking to attract more users to their site by making it sticky. There's also Froogle, Google's version of an online catalog where you can buy just about any kind of product.

Number two is MSN. Not content to be in number two position, Bill Gates, richest man in America, is adding a spider search engine to his site to offer a much larger segment of Internet.

For some time now, only way to get into MSN was to pay for it. MSN was part of a network of sites including Looksmart, which lost a lot of its popularity when it switched to a paid model.

In number one spot is Yahoo. Over last several years, if you wanted to be in Yahoo directory, it cost $299. Until recently, Yahoo's backend results came from Google until they split. Now Yahoo has acquired Altavista, AllTheWeb, Inktomi, and Overture. Yahoo now has its own spider search engine, and you can get listed free.

SUBMISSION

Submission to the major search engines is easier than ever now because all of them have, or are, building spider search engines.

Note: A spider search engine is different from a directory. Sites offering spider search engines actually "crawl" site and add all of pages on your site to engine provided pages aren't too deep. With directories, human beings usually review sites before adding them to make sure sites are added to correct category.

Times can vary on when your site will be accepted.

For Google, it can take as little as three days to 30 days. Google reserves right not to accept your site.

You can submit to Google here: http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Make sure that you read all of instructions on this site to make most of submitting your site to this search engine, as well as get additional tips about search engine submission.

MSN's search results are currently powered by Inktomi Search Index. MSN is currently working on its own version of a spider search engine.

There are no guarantees your site will be accepted or that your site will be accepted in a certain length of time.

You can submit your site here: http://www.submit-it.com/msnsubmit.htm

1.Search Engine Friendly Pages It is important that when you design your website you not only bear in mind what your website requirements are, but also what requirements are for search engines. Best way to approach this is to remember that search engines don’t really care about how nice or complicated your graphics or flash movies are, or how snazzy your javascript is. Instead search engines look at code behind your page. Therefore if you want to impress a search engine, then your code needs to be nice and easy to read. Now from this I don’t mean adding ‘comment’ tags and breaking lines of code up with spaces, but to ensure that elements search engine is interested in, i.e. Title tag, Description tag, Keyword tag (these days only some search engines really use keyword tag), Alt tag, are readable near beginning of code. Search Engines don’t like wadding through lines and lines of javascript to get to core areas that can help you page’s ranking. Therefore careful planning and positioning of your page elements is required.

TIPS: ·If you’re using table for laying out your page then make them simple and not too complex. ·Avoid using frames. ·If you need javascripts for navigation purposes, then use smaller scripts to call up bulk of javascript from a different file. ·Think twice on how to use graphics – make them relevant to your content and use Alt tag for all images. ·Position main content of page before images, or at least with images nested between text.

2.Keywords Having good keywords is one of most important areas to consider when designing a website/webpage. One of best tools for this is Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com), which allows you to identify good competitive keywords for your pages. In general range of keywords associated to your pages can be very extensive therefore for good concentration and prominence of keywords it is advisable to carefully select top 10-15 keywords. You can always export results to Excel and try out other competitive keywords if ones you selected initially do not produce any noticeable benefits.