Getting your website listed on the search engines can be done in two ways. Either you pay somebody to do it or you can put in hours and hours of effort and head scratching. This short article is meant for those who are still scratching.

TERMINOLOGY : Before we begin, you need to know what are the terms we will refer to and what they mean.

PageRank?/a>: - PageRank is the importance Google assigns to a page based on an automatic calculation that factors in the link structure of the web and many other variables.

link:operator :- The query link:siteURL shows you all the pages that point to that URL. For example, link:www.google.com will show you all the pages that point to Google's home page. You cannot combine a link: search with a regular keyword search.

Meta Tags: The meta tags provide search engines with details about you, the website and the concerned page.

Google Toolbar: Download and install the google toolbar. Not only will it show you your PageRank? , it is also very useful for auto filling forms and bloacking popups.

Where Do I Begin: Most often, webmasters think about SEO only when they have a working website and are looking for traffic. Even though this is wrong, I accept that it's human nature to worry about things once they're in front of you. For now, we'll consider that you have a working website with a lot of pages, which need to be made search engine friendly.

Here's a list of basic things you have to remember:

1. Work out the keywords your site represents. Example: If you sell adult toys, you should maximize that combination. Meaning that the two words "adult toys" should be seen in the same sentence, preferably at the top of your page, and throughout your site, as many times as possible, but not so much that the message of the sentence gets lost.

2. Avoid extensive scripting. Not only does it slow your page while loading in a visitors' browser, it also turns off some of the search spiders.

3. Search engines love text , so even if you have a lot of graphics or images to show, fill up the spaces with text. This is especially important right after your body tag.

4. Your index page must have links to every topic page on your website. The same applies to subtopics which must be linked to the topic page. The link should be the keyword you are focusing on for that page.

5. Use different size and style text (. h1, h2, h3,strong,em) for descriptions, paragraphs, introduction and summary.

Let's get started:

Let's begin with your index page. Save your page under some other name before you begin. Get your meta tags correct. Check for description, keywords, robots and revisit-after tags.

Delete any unnecessary scripts inside your head tags. You probably have a banner right after your body tag. This is what the search engine picks up first and considers to be the main body text of your site. So, what you are actually doing is giving your sponsor free search engine exposure. There is a way to get around this. If you see the top of this page, you'll see the banner comes first. But actually, what the spiders are looking at is the "Search Engine Optimization for Beginners" line. It's called table optimization.

Click here to see how it's done.

Once you're done with this, remember that your description and links to topic pages should be at the top.

Exchange Links: All this optimization is of no use if other websites aren't linking to you. Exchange links with other sites which belong to the same category or sector as yours. Even nicer if the page linking back to you from the other site has a page rank higher than yours.

Once you're satisfied that you have a good site, full of content, keyword heavy and linked up to a lot of sites, submit your site to all the search engines.dmoz.org is very important because a lot of search engines, including google build their directories from Dmoz. See list of search engines to submit your web site.

Follow these simple rules, add one page of content a day ( don't forget to link to it from your index page ), submit your site for a link exchange to at least one site everyday, and in a few months, you should start getting heavy results.

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