Get Listed In Search Engines

Google

Google is the probably best engine to be listed in. It is one of the most widely searched and they offer tools to help you in designing your page.

There are two things you need to do if you want your page listed in google.

First, submit your site name to the Google add url form. After that, I highly suggest you sign up for their sitemap program. If you need help designing your sitemap to submit, you can use mine and just edit the urls to what you want. The syntax is easy enough to understand, just replace my links with the important pages of your site. My sitemap is here, feel free to copy and paste and edit to your liking. Once you are done, place the sitemap.xml in your home directory and submit to Google. The sitemap program will tell you where your page is ranked, what search results show your page, and if your site has any errors, like broken links.

At this point, create a robots.txt file, and place it in your home directory, if you haven't already made one.
My robots.txt is here, when creating yours however, the only line you really need is the following:

User-agent: *

Yahoo! & Lycos

Yahoo! is another great engine to have your page listed in. Submit your url again to Yahoo! here. Yahoo! does not have a sitemap program, but there is something similar you can do. If your website runs PHP, there is a script you can use to convert the sitemap.xml you used for Google into a map that you can use for Yahoo!. I read this article to make the yahoo.txt file that can be used as a yahoo sitemap. To do the same, download this php script and upload it to your server in the same directory as your sitemap.xml. Run the script through your browser, and it will generate a file called yahoo.txt. My yahoo.txt is here. After you generate this yahoo.txt file, go to the yahoo submission url again, and for the url, put the location of your yahoo.txt and submit. Lycos is included in this because it uses the Yahoo! search engine to find websites.

MSN

MSN was the quickest to add my site to their search engine. Once again, just submit your site to the MSN add url form here. Soon, if you have AWStats setup or a similar website stat list for your page, you will notice the MSN bot has visited your page and hopefully added you to the index.

Ask Jeeves

Ask Jeeves the hardest search engine to be listed in. There is no free add url form for this search engine. You do have the option of paying Ask a fee to be included in the results, but I wouldn't suggest it, since I have gotten this site in Ask for free, it just took a lot longer. Submit your site to the Open Directory Project here. You have to pick a category for your page and provide a good description on why you should be listed to be accepted. If your site does get popular enough to be listed in the other search engines, there is still a good chance the AskJeeves bot will visit your page and include you in the search directory.

Tips To Get Listed

Content is the most important thing to get listed. Search engines will not add your page if you have an "Under Construction" or "Coming Soon" notice on every single page.

The more websites that link to your page, the faster you will get listed. Put your website in your signature in online forums that you visit.

Search engines may take up a week to list you, be patient and make sure you have some type of web stats so you can tell if the bots have visited your site yet.