The majority of people find a web site through a search engine so obviously, registering your site is very important if you want traffic. Also, if your site doesn't show up within the first three pages of a search engine listing, then the changes are your traffic from that link will not be very substantial.

This page will give you a list of free web site submission services and a description of the major search engines and how to get listed. 

A lot of your search engine ranking depends on your site design. I will go over some of the basic concepts and give you links to free tools to help analyze your site.

Several companies have software, that allow you to download a free trial version. The software will analyze your site and give you tips and suggestions to make your site more "Search Engine Friendly". 

There are several companies that will provide search engine optimization, but unfortunately I haven't found any that are free.

Different search engines use different aspects of your web site to rank your site in your index. For example, Google, uses PageRank as a major influence as to your web site ranking. Google figures a link to a web page is a "vote" for that site so the more links you have to your site, the better. In determining page rank, several factors are taken into account, for example, pages with high page ranks "vote" counts more towards increasing your page rank. Also, if the link has key words in it, those key words relevancy are increased. Links to your site can not penalize you, but links from your site to other sites can hurt your rank. If you really want to see a lengthy explanation of Page Rank, click here.

So What does this mean? Obviously link exchanges can help your site, but Google does not distinguish between links on your web site and links from other webs sites. Use text links instead of image links on your site. A search engine can't "read" images. Also, a site index helps increase the number of internal links your site has. Why not configure your site index as a custom 404 (page not found) error page. Remember that the size and position of a link can influence the link relevance. When giving links to other web sites, make sure the links are relevant and keep the number of links as small as possible.

The Google toolbar does not always calculate your PageRank correctly. It sometimes "Guesses" (see more in the PageRank Paper here). To get a good idea of your PageRank, click here.

You can also get a good idea of who is linking to you by using Uptimebot. A free link popularity checker.

Look at your web site the way most search engines see your site. Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as Javascript, cookies, session ID's, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site. Click here for a web site that lets you enter your URL and see your site as if it were viewed in Lynx.

Meta tags are used by some search engines and disregarded by others. Thee are a few engines that won't even index your site if it doesn't have Meta Tags. Meta tags are not required in web pages, but some search engines read this information even though it isn't. There is more information if you do a Google search for META TAGS. You'll also find some tools that will help create the meta tags for you, but really they aren't that hard. The two key tags that some search engines use are the description and the Keywords meta tags. Description is usually what the search engine displays when your site is pulled up by a search engine. Keywords is a list of keywords separated by a comma  that describe your site. Remember to use synonyms and misspellings along with slang. The META tags are listed in the Heading section of your HTML. See the example below. You can basically use this code in your document.

Several Search Engines obviously look for keyword density in you web pages. They will also check for image names and the ALT image tag on images and some even look at the HTML comment lines.

No Image Tag:
<IMG SRC="dollar.gif">

With Image Tag:
<IMG SRC="dollar.gif" ALT="A dollar bill">

HTML Comments:
<!-- Comments here -->
 

Finally, make sure your HTML code is correct. Even if you use a program like FrontPage, run your pages through a validation to make sure you comply with the W3C standards (the World Wide Web Consortium develops the web standards), 'cause I haven't seen many pages pass even if they are built with a program. Fortunately, the W3C organization provides a free validation here. Some search engines penalize you or worse yet just don't index you if your HTML standards aren't up to snuff.
 

Google
Google is the search engine of today. I would argue they are number one over any other search engine and it powers other search engines. Google ignores META Tags and relies heavily on PageRank. You can submit your page for free at http://www.google.com/intl/en/addurl.html. There is no need to submit more than one of your pages as Google will crawl your web and find the other pages. Google will also find your page if you get listed in the Open Directory. I have found that Google usually indexes your web page relatively quickly. Google also has a very good advertising program which I review in the Advertising section.

Yahoo
Yahoo has been around for the longest, and is probably second in popularity to Google, but I never have liked this site since it has always been a major pain to get listed. I always figured if you have to pay (especially several hundred dollars) to get listed in a search engine, then it can't have all the web sites in its directory so it may not have the best information.

Since Yahoo is a necessary evil, fortunately, there is a back door to get listed in the Yahoo directory and non-commercial sites can get in for free after editorial review.

First, if you get listed in the Open Directory, you will eventually show up in the Yahoo directory as well.

Second, for non-commercial sites, do a DIRECTORY search on Yahoo. Find the category you want to submit to. If you are submitting for free to a non-commercial category, click on the "Suggest a Site" link that appears at the top right-hand corner of category page. That will bring up a submission form. Fill it out, and you're done.

I really recommend submitting your pages manually to each search engine. Maybe that is just my view, but most search engines now-a-days have images and other features that try to eliminate automated submissions so who knows if the submission is really working. If you still decide to use an automated submission process, I would recommend using a junk e-mail account to decrease the SPAM possibility. This is just a partial list. You can do a google search for Free Search Engine Submission to find more.

Free Web Submission
Not only do they provide a good top 50 list of the search engines, they will submit your site to 20 of them for free.

Fast Submit
They will submit your site to 100+ search engines.

Submit Express
They will submit your site to 40 search engines.

Submit Shop
They will submit your site to 20 search engines.

AddPro
They will submit your site to 18 search engines.

WebPosition Gold
Web Position Gold gives you a free trial download. Their software evaluates your web pages specifically for each search engine, submits them to the search engines and gives you automated status reports as to where your page is in the search engines index. Their free newsletter will also keep you up to date on the major search engines. I have actually purchased this product to use on some of my commercial sites. I think it's pretty impressive.

Submit It Wolf
Another program to submit your web site and offers a free download. I do not find this program as useful, but you might as well use a free trial.