It's the hottest topic on the Net: how to get your site to the top of the list. Everywhere you look there's somebody giving you advice, but you know what? Most of that advice is theory passed on from person to person. Not many people have tested their own theories over a long period of time to see what works and what doesn't. I have. All the advice you're about to read is from first hand experience. I worked all this out on my own with a lot of trial and error, and as a result I have some severely successful sites to my name. You can too.
There are two types of search engine: the deep engine, like Alta Vista and Infoseek, which sends out a robot to your site and saves the info from your page itself, and then there's the standard engine (also known as "directory") which doesn't use any info from your page, only the info which you give it by way of an online submission form. The most important of all search engines is Yahoo! and it's absolutely vital to take extreme care when you submit to this one. Building A Keyword List Before you touch anything, you have to decide which words are best suited to the topic of your site. Think carefully because the key is to match the words your potential visitors are likely to type into a search engine. Users tend to be fairly general with their initial searches, then they narrow it down. So, if you have a pet shop the keyword 'pets' is going to be more powerful than 'dogs'.
You can choose between a short, powerful keyword list which is likely to put you high up but with only a limited number of words, or you can have a long list which will put you slightly lower, but with a broad spectrum of keywords.
