SEO is quite the buzz word, but there's a lot more to search engine optimization than big promises and lots of flashy jargon.

The logic behind search engine optimization is making your site as appealing as possible to the search engines, and therefore enabling it to be seen and clicked on by a person performing a search.

But how do websites appear on search engines? Well, there are three main ways that this happens.

The first way is that you, as a website owner, pay a small fee to a company to have your site submitted to a large number of search engines. With some companies, you can have your site submitted to over 200 search engines for less than $40 a year.

The second way is by manually submitting your site to as many engines and directories as possible. This approach is much less effective and a lot more time consuming. However, most major search engines provide a simple method for submitting your site.

The easiest to way to find out how this works is to go to your search engine and look for something like '<name of your search engine here> website submission'. That should give you the answer quickly enough, and if not, try the same thing, but replace the word 'website' with 'url'.

The third way is a matter of chance or mathematics. Either a search engine stumbles upon one of your pages, by some stroke of luck, or someone links to your site and a search-engine spider (bot) follows the link to your site.

Needless to say, random chance certainly isn't the best method. There are also a few pieces of software out there that promise to submit your site to x number of search engines and directories. If you want to check out these options, feel free.

Be aware that these packages often fail to live up to their promises, and not all of them last very long. Not to mention, they cost money, and they cost more money to update. That's the $$ to buy it, the doing-it-yourself part on a regular basis, and the paying again and again for updates again and again... Still, it does work for some people.

Search Engine Readability

It is very important for search engines to see your site and be able to navigate it well. Remember that most search engines can't read images. Not many of them do well with tons of fancy script and code either. For the most part, they prefer a diet of text.

If you do end up using images, try to steer clear of too much heavy script. Try to stick to html & css for the majority of your content. If you do make use of images, remember that each image should have an alt tag and a title tag. These two tags provide text that the search engines can chew on, and they also provide information to people when they move their mouse over the image.

By making sure that the majority of your content is text, you ensure that search engines can find it. You also ensure that if it's an odd day on the net, having a few broken pictures appear on your site won't make your page completely unreadable.

Your Basic Tags

There are a few basic tags that are essential to a well-built and search-engine friendly page. Just like images have their tags, so does the page itself:

The first tag is obvious, and it's quite noticeable if you miss it, too. I've seen more than one company spend a bucket of money on a website with a home page on the search engines entitled 'index.gif'', ''untitled page'', and of course the list goes on. Not exactly what you really want right? Make sure to give each page a title, and help make sure the headline on the search engine reflects what you want it to say.

The second one is the meta tag description. This tag provides the search engines with a description of the page content. It's a quick, two or three-sentence summary.

The third one is the meta tag for keywords. This tag gets a lot of hype. It contains the keywords for your page; each word listed in the keywords meta tag should represent a description that people might type into a search engine. For example, a page that talks about dog shows would have those two words among its keywords.