Submitting to search engines is easy but I have been asked about it in the past so here it is.

To get a listing in a search engine you must submit your site to it. Most search engines will have a link or a button for you to be taken to the submitting process. Yahoo! Being one of the most popular starting places for a lot of web-surfers requires you to navigate to the section you want to add your site to before 'suggesting a site' as they call it.

Having spoken of Yahoo! It would be a good place for me to tell you about waiting. Search engines will take at least 2 weeks to process your application but the large and popular ones will take more like a month or maybe even two! So don't expect instant results.

There are all kinds of things that affect your listing in the engine. A good set of meta tags is a good start, how long you've been in the search engine is another, how many pages the site has will help and the most important one is how many other sites in the search engine are linked t your site. So swapping links with other people pays off big time!

A final word - beware sites that say they will submit you to 40 search engines in one go. More often that not they want your e-mail address and that's because they want to sell it to spammers, believe me you don't want that! On the other hand they do actually work, so if you wanted to (I wouldn't possibly do this) is set up an online e-mail account such as hotmail and send that e-mail address with your application and then all the spam will be delivered there! The people at hotmail won't like this so don't do it ;)

by Pete