A Search Engine is first place someone on Internet goes to look for...anything. So how do you get listed in Search Engines? First, ask yourself what YOU would type in a browser to find YOUR website. Do you have an online gift shop? What do you sell in it? Use those words AND phrases as your keywords.

Got them ready? Good. Now, what do you do with them? You use them - in your website description, page title(s) and meta tags.

Your what? Meta Tags. These keywords are placed within HTML Code of your web pages. Slow Down! HTML Code? HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language, to be specific) is code that makes "pieces" of your site (graphics, text and/or links) show up where you want them to on your web page.

Once you (or your website designer) have keywords in place, you can "submit" your site to search engines. You CAN use a submission service to quickly add your URL, but...you don't know for sure if it's been added unless you do it yourself.

Each Search Engine has it's own specific rules for submission. Be sure you read their policies thoroughly because they change often.

Here are links to top FREE search engines to submit to:

Americans For Computer Privacy - This is organization to take a look at if you are interested in privacy matters.

http://www.computerprivacy.org

Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) - One of oldest organization of all. This group is huge and has so many benefits that it's impossible to list them here. It can be highly technical, and tends towards theory and practice of computing. They have dozens of publications and for about a hundred bucks you get access to a huge online library of white papers and technical works.

http://www.acm.org

Better Ethics Online (BEO) - A great group all about ethics of online world. They have several lists of known spamming email addresses which can be used in filtering software.

http://actionsites.com/beo/index.html

Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email - Want to learn about spam and how to prevent it? This is a great organization to join and join fight.

http://www.cauce.org

Cyber Crew - A group of volunteers which covers just about everything on internet. More of a users group than anything else.

http://www.cyber-crew.com

HTML Writer's Guide - This organization has lots of good web-based courses and a certification program (Certified Web Professional). This group (which has merged with International Webmasters association) has many other great features. Yearly members is about fifty bucks, and this gets you courses at half price.

http://www.iwanet.org

IEEE - One of very largest and oldest computer societies. In fact, computers are only a portion of what this organization offers. Thousands of papers are available online to members, and dozens of publications are published. This group tends to be highly technical and very in-depth.