Although getting a free search engine listing is a bit tricky, it's not rocket science. By properly preparing your web page and submitting them to the right sources, you can get a very good ranking on many of the more popular ones...FREE!

Before submitting your web page, make sure it is ready. Make sure all the links are working properly and check your spelling and grammar for errors. This is a must for submitting to directories. Directory submissions are reviewed by human editors.

Prepare a description of your page, 30 words or less. Again, reviewers will be using this when they visit your site. This description will also be displayed in search results.

Once this is done, make sure to include meta tags in your web page heading. Pay particular attention to the keywords meta tag. This is important because this is how many of the search engines that use crawlers will find and index you. A good search engine positioning article to read up on the basics is:

"A Down and Dirty Guide to Search Engine Positioning" http://cynted.com/articles/dirty.htm

Be sure to include your targeted keyword(s) in your web page description. Include them in the title of your site as well. Include your keyword(s) in the "alt=" tag for images. Visit my site at http://www.cynted.com and view the source code. From your browser menu, just click on "view" and then "source." You will see what I'm talking about.

Also, take a look at how many times "internet marketing" is used on my main page. This is called keyword density. Note My how my targeted keyword is used frequently but meaningfully throughout the page.

Now you're ready to start submitting your web page! To get started, first submit your site to the Open Directory Project (ODP). Getting listed here will also get your site indirectly listed on YaHoo, Google and AOLSearch.

[NOTE: YaHoo lists results AFTER listing pages in its own directory first. You can do a search for your site without viewing all their results by searching the "Web Page" category.]

Before submitting to ODP, be sure and read the instructions to make sure your web page meets their criteria.

To submit your site to the ODP, follow this link: http://dmoz.org/add.html

Next, submit your site to Lycos. By adding your site here, you also get a free listing on HotBot.

To submit your site to Lycos, follow this link: http://searchservices.lycos.com/searchservices/

Another popular search engine is AllTheWeb, the world's largest search engine. This search engine also uses the ODP for search results.

To get listed on AllTheWeb: http://alltheweb.com/add_url.php

And finally, to get listed on AltaVista follow this link: http://addurl.altavista.com/sites/addurl/newurl

There you have it? Wait about 4-6 weeks and do a search on the key words you chose and you should find your site listed somewhere on each of the above search engines/directories.

I did this sometime ago for my site with my primary keywords being "internet marketing tips" and here are the results:

AllTheWeb: #13 AltaVista: #5 AOLSearch: #5 Excite: #3 Google: #6 HotBot: #4 Lycos: #13 ODP: #29 WebCrawler: #3 YaHoo: #6 (After their web site matches)

About the author: Edward Gause is webmaster of the Cynted Internet Marketing Center and publisher of the Cynted Chronicle, a bi-weekly ezine targeting the interests of novice netmarketers. To subscribe by email mailto:subscribe@cynted.com or visit http://www.cynted.com