You have a company web site because you want visitors. Web site visitors are measured by "hits," the number of times viewers receive information from your site's server. However, hits are a poor way to measure site traffic. What counts is how long the visitor stayed on your site, how many hot buttons he followed to sections he read.

Your web site is one of literally millions of pages of online information. And no one directory lists every single page on the web. To draw visitors to your site you must promote it. Most visits arrive from somewhere else on the web. Search engines, which attempt to catalog websites by topic, trigger a great deal of site traffic. For instance, you can search for "apple farms" and get a list of several thousand sites that somehow relate to apple farms. You'll also get a lot of sites that don't.

There are approximately 10 top search engines. These are Yahoo (which really isn't technically a search engine,) HotBot, LookSmart, InfoSeek, Lycos, AltaVista, Northern Light, Excite, Direct Hit, and the Open Directory. New engines pop up all the time. Since each search engine organizes, acquires, stores and categorizes its information differently, the same search on different search engines is likely to turn up different results.

To get listings, whether you plan to submit your site yourself or hire an expert as we recommend, you must prepare several kinds of information. Your page titles are most important to some search engines. Your home page title should convey the essence of your site and each subsequent page title should explain what is on that page.

The meta tags are information placed in the HTML document of your site. These tags will not be seen by the public, but can be accessed by spiders and other information retrievers visiting your site. Unfortunately, not all search engines recognize meta tags. The tags with which you should be most concerned are Titles and Keywords, which are the most likely to be detected by search engines.

You need a minimum of 10 keyword phrases that search engines can use to match queries to your site. To make this list, think of all the possible words and phrases someone might use as search terms when trying to locate your site. For example, if you sell seat belts, your keyword list might include: seat belts, seat belt makers, affordable seat belts, precision seat belts, custom seat belts, vehicle safety equipment, car safety, child seat belts, car safety equipment, seat belt makers, seat belt manufacturers, and so on. Each of these phrases represent a way that a potential customer might search for sites in your category.

The best services hand-submit customized listings to at least the top 10 search engines and machine submit the others. However, search engine listings and methods change as often as daily. Maintaining a high ranking is a tedious and necessarily ongoing job. Make sure the service you use will keep checking and updating your ranking regularly to see that you maintain high placement.