Many web page developers seem to think that if you build a page, people will come.  Unfortunately, life isn't quite so simple. With over two billion pages currently published on the internet, the odds of someone bumping into yours is rather remote, unless it is well promoted.

Web page promotion entails registering your URL with one or more search engines and there are literally hundreds of search engines in existence today. Search engines can be national, international, of subject specific. There are, however, only 6 or 7 very large search engines which are used by most internet users on a regular basis. You should certainly register your site with each of them. Depending on your objectives, you may also want to register with some of the international, national, regional or subject based search engines. 

When a search engine becomes aware of the existence of your page, a "robot" or "crawler" (i.e. computer programs) will visit your site and create a set of database indexes based on words or phrases that it finds. Search engines differ from one another to some degree but in general, indexing occurs based on the number of times that specific words or combination of words are found in the title, section headings and body of the page. The title and first paragraph on your page are important for indexing purposes.  Your first paragraph one each page should therefore contain a concise overview of the page.

When building their database indexes, most search engines consider meta tags. Meta tags are specified by the web page developer using HTML statements that are invisible to the visitor. Alternative spellings or synonyms of significant words appearing on your page should be included as meta "keywords".

The web page developer can also specify a meta "description" which summarizes the page content. This descriptive text is used as the page summary in search engines. If a meta description has not been specified for your page, the robot or crawler will just select a few random lines of text from your page to be used as the page description. 

Want to see the title, description, and keywords for the page you are viewing right now? Here's how.

If your browser that you're viewing this page with has a link or button at the top titled as "View", click on it, then click on "source" or page source". A separate page will pop up that shows the HTML code I have written into this page. This code is what the computers and robots see when a search engine spiders (searches) your web site. If your code is written well and you follow the rules established by search engines, you stand a fairly good chance of getting listed in search results. Usually the top listings in major search engines are paid ads... "sponsored ads".

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