What does this mean? It means you must spend some time designing your site properly so engines can make a good guess as to what it's about. You see, search engines are robots - they are automated pieces of software which examine your pages and attempt to decipher subject(s). This translates to words and phrases that robots believe will allow best describe your site to people who need your information.

What this actually means is for each page of your site, you must be able to come up with some good keywords which accurately describe contents of that page. Once you've done that, you must scatter those keywords throughout page in various ways. The search engine robot will examine your pages, see keywords in places it likes, and determine your page is indeed about that subject. For many engines, better you do this higher your site will be in results when someone searches using that keyword (this is called ranking). And, as should be obvious, higher you are in listings, more hits you will receive.

Google is one of most significant exceptions to this rule. It's primary concern is not keywords on your pages. No, Google actually looks at links to your pages and uses this information to determine your site's ranking.

Making your pages "search engine friendly" is not difficult but it can be tedious. The basic procedure is to pick a keyword which describes your page, then scatter that keyword in various places: title, description and keyword Metatags, ALT tags on images, H1 and H2 headers and within first couple of paragraphs of text. To satisfy Google, you can get people to link to site with text including keyword as well.

Okay, so now you've got some pages which are very descriptive to search engines. How do you get them listed?

You submit them, of course.

Virtually all search engines have a page which allows you to submit one or more URLs from your site. Some search engines are smart and require only a single URL, others require as many URLs as you want to give them (occasionally limiting number that you can enter in a single day). All of them have rules about spamming (making many submissions on a single day or week, or trying to get your site better ranked using unethical means). So be sure not to submit your site too often.

While it is true that directories themselves can produce quite a bit of traffic, there are additional benefits that come with a directory listing. Unfortunately, these advantages are not often mentioned and that is why they are unknown to most siteowners. Many are well aware that you can influence directories by submitting to different search engines; for example, you can submit to Google and if you're lucky and keyword you're aiming at is rare enough, your site will appear in searches that are performed at Yahoo. But did you know that directory listings can have a massive impact on how your site performs in different search engines?

Some of large search engines, for example MSN and AOL, draw their search results almost entirely from different directories. MSN relies heavily on Looksmart and AOL is affiliated with DMOZ. If your site is not listed in these two directories, it will not appear in searches at MSN and AOL. Since they both are very big sites, receiving together around 100 million visitors each month, it is very important to have your site well represented in them.