You've built up a good site, put in a lot of content, but none of the search engines lists your site? If you'd like to know how to go ahead with Search Engine Submission the right way, read on.

How do I get my site to be included in search-engines?

That's a question a lot of people ask me. My question back to them is "Is your Site Search-engine ready?". A lot of sites don't get spidered into search engine results just because the pages are not search-engine friendly. Search engines like to see a lot of text on your site. This means that if your site is filled with Flash animations and graphics, instead of text for content, your site probably not show up in search-engine results. Another reason your site might be loosing out in search engine rankings could be the lack of meta-tags.

So what are meta-tags? Metatags are small pieces of code which you embed into your pages which informs your search engines about your site's contents, how to spider your site, and other such instructions.

Most search engines look at your page's meta-tags and title tag to get the relevant information to index your site. So you should make sure that all your pages have the relevant details in meta-tags. The three most important tags for your site are 'DESCRIPTION' and 'KEYWORDS' meta-tags and the 'Title' tag on all pages.

• The 'DESCRIPTION' tag is used to describe the contents of the page. You should enter a short description of the page in this tag. Here's how the tag will look when you enter the description of the page:

• The 'KEYWORDS' tag is used to tell the search engine which keywords words you feel are important in the page. This helps in the ranking process of search engines. In your keywords tag, use as many combinations of your search term as you can, without repeating the same terms too many times. Some search engines penalize a site for repeating keywords. Here's how a keywords tag would look :

• Every page you have on your site should have a Title tag. All search engines use the content of your title tag to index the content of your site. So make sure you've got a Title tag and the Title has some relevance to the content in your page. An example of the title tag :

How to submit your site

So once you've entered your tags properly, your start of the HTML code for the page should look like this :

How to submit your site

These three tags by themselves should give a boost to your ranking once the search engine crawls your site. If you want a tool to make the tags for you, check out my Meta-Tag Generator Script at: http://www.vinuthomas.com/gate.html?name=MetaMaker. This online tool helps you generate the basic and some advanced meta-tags for your pages.

Now how do you get the search engine to crawl your site? You'll have to start submitting your site to the search-engines for them to start crawling your site. Here are the Submission URL's for some of the major search engines:

Google: http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Exact Seek: http://www.exactseek.com/add.html

All The Web: http://addurl.alltheweb.com/add_url

MSN Search : http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm

Altavista : http://addurl.altavista.com/addurl/new

Scrub The Web: http://www.scrubtheweb.com/addurl.html

Sympatico : http://pre.sympatico.ca/en/search/submit.html

True Search : http://www.truesearch.com/addurl/

Lycos : http://insite.lycos.com/

Ask Jeeves/Teoma : http://ask.ineedhits.com/sitesubmit.asp