A very popular method people use to find websites is a keyword search at a search engine or index.

If your website does not appear within the first 30 results returned from a keyword search, you might as well not be listed at all. So, how do you ensure that your website will appear near the top?

Have you ever wondered how Search Engines decide which websites are listed first in keyword search results?

SEO, (Search Engine Optimization), is a group of code methods and concepts used for getting placement in major Internet Search Engines. Major Search Engines genuinely want you to advance placement for your site using SEO techniques. The reason for this is simple: Search Engines want to provide their users with the best, most valuable results that are relevant to the search. Legitimate SEO actually helps Search Engines improve their services.

The primary rule for SEO implementation: stay relevant to the material at hand. You cannot optimize your site for "apples" if it is about "oranges" even though they both belong to a "fruit" group. If your site is about oranges, optimize for "fruit" and then "oranges" specifically.

What you need:

• A workable knowledge of HTML, (the encoding language for Web Browsers).
• A website that has prime content.
• The time it takes you to learn SEO techniques and concepts.

Submit your site by hand and be extremely wary of programs for which you will receive spam: "submit your site to 900 search engines for only $19.95!". Such lists of "engines" are not responsible for even minor traffic, (most being simply Free For All sites). Even though the main engines appear on these lists, automated submitting processes have been suspected of being put at the back of the queue at the major Search Services.

If you really care, all you have to do is submit to the top six Search Engines by hand:

Note: Yahoo! is not a search engine per se. Yahoo! is what's known as a "Directory". That is, Yahoo! is a subjective list of sites in alphabetical order compiled by Yahoo! staff editors' choices based on site merit. Search Engines, by contrast, are machine-compiled and machine-searchable "Indexes" where SEO methods can have influence.

Want to learn more about this topic? Here are several resources you can use:

Now that we've learned a bit about search engines and indexes, let's move on to other methods of finding websites.