If your Web site is designed by The Great E-scape®, we submit your site to the major free search engines. If you would like to do this for your site yourself, we suggest that you begin with: Open Directory Project. After a few weeks you will begin to find your Web site name within those search engines. Your Web site will also receive a page ranking. This ranking will fluctuate so if you are interested in a higher ranking, we suggest that you contact Google or Yahoo directly and discuss with them their paid placement services.

There are a few things that a Web site owner can do to improve page ranking. The most useful of these are (1) adding new content on your Web site pages which brings the robots to your site, and (2) being linked to by other Web sites -- especially Web sites that have existed for several years.

What follows is a short discussion of search engines and how they work.

An Internet search engine is a tool that Web surfers use to search the Internet. Think of it as a Yellow Pages for Internet Web sites, but much more advanced. People type in words or phrases for which they wish to search, and the search engine returns a list of Web sites that match that word or phrase. For example, a search for "online bookstore" might return Web sites like Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble's Web site. A search engine is a critical tool in finding information, products and businesses on the Web.

Each search engine has its own Web site that you can visit in order to perform searches. Search engines are also built into AOL and into Web browsers like Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

A search engine searches all the sites on the Web (or all the sites that it knows about on the Web, to be more precise). A directory only includes sites that have been reviewed and accepted by a person. Search engines generally will find more sites than directories, because search engines automatically add more and more sites to their databases as they find them. But directories generally have higher quality listings because these sites have been screened and reviewed by a human being. Some search engines, like Google and Yahoo combine a directory with a search engine for comprehensive search results.

If there are multiple links from other Web sites to your site, then your site may already be listed in some or all of the search engines. Many search engines send out 'spiders' or 'robots' or 'bots' that endlessly follow links from Web site to Web site seeking out new pages to add to their index databases. If your site is not yet listed in a specific search engine, then you can generally find an "Add URL" feature on the search engine's home page that allows you to request that your Web site be added to the search engine.

Adding your Web site to a search engine, does not necessarily mean that you will increase the traffic to your Web site. There are literally millions of sites on the World Wide Web, and several billion Web pages! Search engines attempt to index as many sites as possible, but generally only cover a small percentage of what's out there. Even so, a search for "books for sale" on Google returns over 3 million pages that match this search phrase! When a user performs a search, he or she will generally only look at the first 3 or 4 pages of Web sites that are returned (usually the first 20 to 40 Web sites). If your Web site does not show up in the first 4 pages for a particular search word or phrase, then you might as well be invisible.

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