Part I

This is the first article in a six part series on how you can get indexed in the most important search engines on the internet. These search engines include Google, Yahoo, MSN, Exactseek, and Alexa. These sites cover over 80 percent of the searches done on the internet, so it's well worth the effort to prepare your site correctly, and submit it to these search engines.

Before you do any kind of promotion on the internet, you need to make sure that your site is properly prepared for the search engines. The reason is that the search engines will be the main way that others find you on the internet.

If you haven't optimized your site for the search engines, now is the time to do it.

There are two tools that you can use, that are absolutely free, to optimize your website. Keep in mind that your main focus should be on optimizing individual pages for various keyword terms on your topic.

Good Keywords - http://www.goodkeywords.com - This tool will tell you what others are searching for, as well as how often the search terms are searched for in a month. Windows.

Web CEO - http://www.webceo.com - This software suite will not only help you optimize your pages for the search engines, but it will help you find link partners, as well as keyword terms, and you can use it to submit to other lesser known search engines. Windows and MAC.

It is beyond the scope of this article to teach you how to optimize your site for the search engines. Web CEO contains step by step documentation that will teach you everything you need to know about search engine optimization.

What's important here is that you find out specifically what keywords and keyword phrases searchers are looking for when searching. If you optimize your site for the wrong keyword search terms, either no one will find you, or you will have so much competition, you won't be able to get your site to rank very high.

Most searchers won't go beyond the first three pages of results. Rank below this, and you'll have a tough time being found.

Another important point to remember is that each of the main search engines is different. You can optimize your site for Google, which is the most important search engine right now, but you can optimize your site for indexing in all of the major search engines if you do it right.

Avoid techniques like keyword stuffing, redirect pages that are unrelated to your site, and junk pages. Multiple domains pointing to the same site or a mirror site are a definite no no.

Although there is some debate these days about using other writers' articles because of the duplicate content rule, remember that all of the major search engines are full of duplicate content.

Using articles written by other authors is a great way to provide value to your site visitors, but you will want to write a few of your own articles. By writing your own articles, you can optimize them for your keyword terms, something you can't do with other writers' articles.

When you write your articles, convert them to HTML and then use Web CEO to optimize them for your keyword terms. Make sure you focus on no more than two to three terms per page, or you will have problems optimizing your page. You want your articles to make sense, and you want them to provide value to your readers.

Finally, once you've optimized your site, you'll want to make sure that you submit them to the major search engines. Although there is some debate these days over whether or not this is necessary, the major search engines aren't perfect, and they don't always update properly.

Once you've submitted your sites, you can move on to the next steps in your internet marketing campaign. Resubmit only when you've made major changes to your sites.

Search engine optimization and submission is a long term marketing strategy. Good ranking, as well as good coverage of your site won't happen overnight. It will happen though if you stick to good search engine optimization techniques to improve your site's ranking.