How to Get Your Website in the Search Engines This is a frequent question and it seems rather mysterious to some people, so here's the brief:

If you want to get your website listed in the Search Engines, there's two "first" steps to take--
Click here to submit your site to Google. There's no guarantee it'll happen, so you may want to do this once a week until you see your site listed in Google, but they're very good and it'll get there within a few weeks, and it's Free.

The second step is to submit your website to DMoZ, which is the Mother of All Search Engines. Where Google is the commercial rage, DMoZ is the purist's search engine, staffed by volunteers (in fact, I'm a DMOZ volunteer) interested in improving Search on the web. When you go to the DMOZ site, you have to look around until you find the tiny category niche that your site fits into, then at the bottom of that page there's a add url link-- click on that, submit your site, and hopefully in about 4-8 weeks your site will be listed in DMOZ. I say hopefully, because it's staffed by volunteers and there are major variations in performance. Here's a link to DMoZ's Beaver County page. Since submission times are long and sometimes unreliable, you should submit your page to a functional category (ie, tax accountants) and also to a location category, to improve your chances.

And this is how it'll work: Your Google submission will get you into Google for free in a few weeks. Your DMOZ submission will take 8-10 weeks, but then it'll filter (for free) into MSN, AOL, Yahoo, AllTheWeb, etc-- all the pay-for-listings websites. Google will get you quick results and DMOZ will get you wide results, and it's all free. I've never seen a need to pay for search engine listings.

Two more points: submitting your site to Search Engines is not the same as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO involves writing the pages to accomplish specific goals, which includes visible changes and also techniques that are transparent to the viewer but significant to the search engines. For instance, do a Google search on any of these phrases: "center curves", "beaver county RV", "pittsburgh construction law", "titanium aluminide", "credit union survey", and you'll see sites I've done SEO work on.

And finally, if you want to submit your site directly to other search engines and not rely on DMoZ, you could click on these links:

• All The Web.com (possibly the next Google)
• Altavista (the previous Google)
• MSN