You submit your site, then wait weeks for search engine "gods" to render their decision. More likely than not, their decision is to either not list your site at all or to give it a ranking so low that a surfer needs deep diving equipment to find you. It's enough to sent you running for a giant size bottle of Prozac.

Your first reaction will probably be to throw your hands up and say heck with those search engines, who needs them?

Don't make this mistake. We all need our sites listed on search engines. More visitors can be gained through search engines than all other marketing venues put together. Nobody can ignore this vast source of potential customers.

So what can a poor beleaguered Webmaster do?

Most of us turn to search engine gurus at this point. We follow their advice on how to make our web sites search engine ready. We insert META tags into our site code. We struggle to add just right description and keywords so major engines will find us worthy of a high listing. When all i's have been dotted and all t's crossed, we submit again and wait.

Five or six weeks later we discover that once again, "big boys" have found our site lacking in some way or another. It's back to drawing board. We read somewhere - to get approved for a decent listing we need to build some "gateway pages." This only takes a few days to a few weeks to figure out and accomplish, but then, at last it's done and we submit once again.

And once again, five or six weeks later, we find that we still can't be found on any of major engines we have submitted and resubmitted to and we feel totally defeated. Now what?

You have three options at that point.

Search Engine: A machine "tuned" by humans to index web pages. For instance, Excite.

Algorithm: The way in which search engine is "tuned". An algorithm is way search engine will determine ranks - it is way search engine is programmed to determine ranks. An algorithm may take only certain things into account - like keywords in title or link popularity. Some engines use cyclical algorithms - meaning they may change algorithms from week to week.

Directory: A list of sites compiled by humans. For instance, Yahoo!

Spider: A spider goes to your site and finds your pages. It then stores those pages in a database for future retrieval by search engine.

Indexing: When search engine takes pages from database that spider has created and places them in an order based on algorithms of that engine. All search engines have a different indexing process - due to different algorithms - that's why you get different results in different engines.

Query: The keywords that a person types into a search box. A person is "querying" search engine.

Crawling: When spider follows links from page you submit - spider is "crawling" your site.

Automatic Update: When spider returns to your pages at periodic intervals to check to see if you've made any changes.

Optimizing: You can optimize, tune or configure your web pages for a specific search engine. This means that you are employing specific strategies for specific engines.

Spam: - Using same keyword more than three times in your keywords tag.

- Putting keywords into your tags that has nothing to do with your actual page content.

- Using text, spacers, or borders same color as background.

- Using tiny text with keywords in an attempt to increase ranks.

B. Search Engines v. Directories

There is a difference between a search engine and a directory. A search engine is a machine - or a "robot". A human may program algorithms for a search engine, but a human will have nothing to do with your site when spider is visiting your site or engine is indexing your pages.

A directory can be compiled by a robot, but more often than not, it is compiled by humans. Yahoo! is a prime example of a directory. When you submit your site to Yahoo! a human will review your site for consideration in their index.