You will want to look at three aspects:

Search Engine Submission - This involves visiting search engine websites, finding 'submit URL / site' section - and keying in appropriate information. Some of them offer a free option but this doesn't guarantee inclusion and could take time to see results. The most important one is open directory which will help your ranking with Google, among others. You can also submit your site to Google, Lycos, Yahoo, AltaVista, MSN and many others. Before you do, make sure you know what information you want to give them. You may be asked for a description, so have one ready. No search engine will accept sales style copy in their listings - so keep it plain. Most importantly, read guidelines for each service - it may seem like a drag but could help your submission.

Page Optimisation - Now search engines know you are there, how easy will it be for them to index your site? This stage comes first, of course - so once you register you site, you can sit back and wait - if you do it for free - you WILL have to wait! The easier it is for SEs to index, faster your site will get noticed. So what do you need to take into consideration? Here are a few tips:

The Widget Queen Revisited You have world's finest collection of widgets. You created world's best widget website. You have no traffic.

You checked in search engines and find that your site does not appear at all, even though all your competitors' sites do. Perhaps search engine robots cannot get to your pages to index them.

Search Engine Robots Search engine robots are simple creatures. They can "read" text to add to their databases, and they can follow "normal" links--those links that are coded to look like

blue widgets

or slight variation

That's it. Search engine robots cannot select items from lists; search engine robots cannot type text into boxes; search engine robots cannot click "submit" buttons. That means that no matter how important our dynamically-generated page of blue widgets is, if only way to access that page is to select it from a list or click on a button, robot will never be able to visit it. That, in turn, means that it will never appear in search engine results.

So how do you get your dynamic information to show up in non-dynamic ways?

The Painful Solution One of reasons that dynamic pages exist is because of difficulty involved in constantly updating -- adding and deleting -- pages from your site, based on which widgets you are offering this season. If you have a separate page for each make and model of widget, each of those pages can be spidered. They can all be reached through links that look like

blue widgets style 1 blue widgets style 2 red widgets style 1 red widgets style 2 new widgets style 1 new widgets style 2

The bad news here, of course, is that you now have to create all of those pages. This loses benefit of drawing widget information from a database.

A Better Solution A better solution is to create only a "shell" of each page, and then to dynamically populate page from our database. By creating a "real" file, you can assign a fixed URL, but still use database to fill-in page, using any of various server-side techniques (HTML server-side includes, Perl, Active Server Pages, Java Server Pages, PHP, etc.). A simple page like this might suffice: