Here are some resources to help you understand how to maximise the benefit you get from search engines and how to register with them. It's worth putting in a few hours effort to (i) learn how and (ii) implement your registration with search engines. That way you pick up visitors searching for a local group for them to join:

Search Engine Tutorial for Web Designers:
http://www.northernwebs.com/set/index.html

Search Engine Marketing Information:
http://www.promotionbase.com/subcats/38

Internet Marketing Brain:
http://internetmarketingbrain.co.uk/

Search Engine Checker (check how well you have been registered):
http://www.hostpulse.com/app/networktools/...archlisting.asp

Search Rank Watch (another search engine checker):
http://www.echoecho.com/position.htm

Feel free to post more search engine related / web site promotion resources here.

Rgds
Kenny

I guess I have to be very careful not to get moderated here, as this is my business!

I don't believe that optimization/submission will continue to be a valid method to promote your site for very much longer. The search engines have a very valuable product, and unsurprisingly that don't want to keep giving it away. Even the apparent "unpaid" listings aren't in fact all unpaid. (I could put a client anywhere on the front page without having to do any submission or optimization)

I can't give away my secrets, but rest assured that (as one of my clients says), Search Engine positioning is like sex - the only way to guarantee you're going to get it is to pay for it!!!

I find just updating my site on a VERY regular basis helps a lot...

Search engines - esp Google - seem to (I don't know if it's true) prefer sites which have been updated recently..

*shrug* who I am I say....

I'm just a little pawn in the game of chess...

You cannot pay to move to your site up the ranks with the like of Google.

You have to design your site to suit the criterion that they dictate for making
your site highly visible.

It's a popular misconception that you can pay to increas your position, well it simply is not true. I have written to Google to ask this before.

Design your site well with relevant Meta Tags etc and you will get high on the list!

Depends how good your relationship with Google is
I have some influence with the search engines. We've signed deals with Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista, Lycos and MSN in the last month, plus we're featured on Espotting's site as abusiness partner

mmmmmmm

I have a friend that works for Google in San Francisco, he confirms it doesn't happen afterall googlebot decides your position!

In any case, no Amateur Drama society is going to be powerful enough or have any money available to improve their position on Google.

He does say however that you can pay money to have your linked displayed to the right of the screen, the green one in the boxes!

I would recommend to anyone who is looking to improve their search ranking, to get there site listed here: Dmoz a lot of search engines base their listings around this database that is compiled by humans.

Another way of getting your site more hits would be to join a webring
Amdram Web Ring

Another way of improving your listing (or used to be at least) was link popularity. There were two different ways of measuring this (that I have heard of but not 100% sure they're both true):
1. Number of sites that link to the same page (so if you have lots of link trades or sometimes even your forum signature link can get indexed) it improved your listing.
2. I seem to remember somewhere that the old Infoseek search engine factored in search engine link links into the calculation so basically the more people searched for your site and clicked the link, the more likely you were to appear at the top of search listings ... doesn't seem fair really.

I know about meta tags etc, also keyword spamming works less these days than it used to.

Re the links above, doen't take the checkers as gospel, I ran them on my own site and a couple of engines listed as not find and yet when I clicked the link it showed my site in page 1 of the search results. Just can't get good coding staff these days

The way we seem to get a lot of hits is through focusing on an area that is not necessarily our main form of business. What I mean by this is that, for example, if you search for "costume hire" + London in Google, our website comes up top, before the National and Angels!! We do have a large wardrobe but hardly in the same sphere as those two!

Needless to say the same doesn't happen if you type in theatre+London ... 52nd, behind the Bob Hope Theatre and Questors ... grrr ...

Did I mention that sites with a domain name related to their content rank higher in search engines against the search terms? Puts this other thread in more context ....

I have often found that page title is a key player as well.

If anyone has visited my site, you may note that our pages are called North West Amateur Drama Adlington Music and Arts Society.

Page titles are a big key...........................

Search under North West Amateur Drama on Google and see who comes up...

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-...t+amateur+drama

Not bad?

Think about it!

Domain name, page title, meta "description" and "Keywords", and the first 255 words a search engine bot finds on the page. Those are the things that improve your search engine ranking, roughly in the order given I think. So make sure they all contain the kewords you expect people to search for.

Just don't include s3x (3=e) on your site, even just to say it doesn't contain any, because you know what kind of visitor you'll get to your site!!

p.s. as an aside, and not being picky, but I find page titles full of keywords very annoying when it comes to adding a site to my favourites because I either have to edit the name or put up with a ridiculously long entry in my favourites.