Many web page developers seem to think that if you build a page, people will come.  Unfortunately, life isn't quite so simple. With several billion pages on the Internet, the odds of someone bumping into yours is rather remote, unless it is well promoted.

Web page promotion entails registering your URL with one or more search engines and portals.

There are literally hundreds of search engines in existence today. Although it is free to add your URL to some search engines, the registration effort does take time.  Most major search engines now charge fees for registration.

Search engines can be national, international, of subject specific. A few very large search engines, however, are used by most internet users on a regular basis. You should certainly register your site with each of these. 

Depending on your objectives, you may also want to register with some of the international, regional or subject based search engines. You can add your URL to each  major search engines by clicking below:

	Add URL to Google
	Add URL to Open Directory

Alternatively, you can use a URL submission service to register your site with multiple search engines at once.

When a search engine becomes aware of the existence of your page, a "robot" or "crawler" will visit your site and create a set of database indexes based on words or phrases that it finds. Search engines use different algorithms, however, in general indexing occurs based on the number of times that specific words or combination of words are found in the title, section headings and body of the page. The title and first paragraph on your page are important for indexing purposes.  Your first paragraph one each page should therefore contain a concise overview of the page.  Link popularity has also become extremely important. 

When building their database indexes, many search engines also consider meta tags. Meta tags are specified by the web page developer using HTML statements that are invisible to the visitor. Alternative spellings and synonyms of important words on your page should be included as meta "keywords".

The web page developer can also specify a meta "description" which summarizes the page content. This descriptive text is used as the page summary in search engines. If a meta description has not been specified for your page, the robot or crawler will just select a few random lines of text from your page to be used as the page description.

In summary, you should take advantage of meta tags and use them wisely.