4. Northern Light Add URL: http://www.northernlight.com/docs/regurl_help.html

5. DMOZ - The Open Directory Project - Add URL: http://dmoz.org/add.html

6. Direct Hit - An Ask Jeeves Service - Add URL: http://www.directhit.com/util/addurl.html

7. Fast - (Formerly "All the Web") - http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php3

Search words are one of the most important parts of your e-business plan. Without the right search words -- without search words at all -- your site might never be found, except through sheer luck! And, luck is not built into a solid business plan.

Search words are those terms, words, and phrases that your customers will key into a search engine like Google or Excite or Yahoo, to see what websites will be displayed. There is no magic to finding your site; however, your choices of the right search words will make a difference to prospective customers.

Typically, you will choose 25-30 search words. Here's an important tip: look at your business from your prospective customers point of view. What words or phrases will they use to find your business? Include commonly misspelled words.

Key here is to ensure that these words were incorporated into the text of your website. Then, you need to decide which engines you will use, whether you will enter your choices into the search engines, or hire someone to do this for you. If you outsource this, your provider will help you determine which engines are the most appropriate. For example, in the manufacturing field, Thomas Register is THE place to register your search words. No other engine works nearly as well for manufacturers.

One on-going issue for the people responsible for maintaining search engines, is that unethical businesses key whatever words they want into the search engines, regardless of what business they are representing. One example is improper use of the word "fishing". Websites that have absolutely nothing to do with fishing information, products, or services are pulled up because the webmasters deliberately used that word at this time of year to lure (no pun intended) visitors to their sites.

As a result, the search engine managers have taken it upon themselves to shake up the rankings from time to time to sort out those "cheaters" with the technology available. That explains why sometimes when you have keyed in a phrase you've used before only to discover that the top seated sites have changed dramatically. Sometimes this shake-out is the reason. Sometimes it's because the new top dog has moved up legitimately. Look carefully and you will see it.

Choosing your search criteria is important. You wouldn't open a store and not advertise it, would you? Think of your search words as advertising; a medium you can change as often as you need to, without recreating everything, which is much more cost effective!

The following is excerpted directly from Digitrends, an e-newsletter.

"How do you grow a business--or perhaps just survive a slump--without breaking the bank? Savvy marketers increasingly are answering this question by turning to search engine optimization (SEO). That is, they’re optimizing their sites for the search engines in order to rank higher, be more visible and generate more traffic. But still, SEO isn’t exactly in widespread use. So, you may be asking yourself, why should we care about getting traffic from search engines?

Facts: More than 80 percent of Web users find the sites they’re looking for by using a search engine, according to both Forrester Research and Georgia Tech’s GVU Center User Surveys. Every single day, 57 percent of Web users search the Internet, making search the second most popular Internet activity after e-mail (according to Statistical Research, Inc.). Clearly, the old "fish where the fish are" analogy holds true here.

Effectiveness: Search listings outscore banner and tile ads by more than two to one on measures including awareness, likelihood to click-on, and overall opinion, in a recent study by NPD Group. The survey also found that consumers are five times more likely to purchase your products after seeing search listings versus banners. Search listings just plain work.

Bull’s-eye: Search engines drive extremely targeted traffic. Think about it: The visitor who finds your site through a search engine is looking for exactly what you’re selling. You can’t find a much warmer prospect than that.

Ante up: SEO is one of the least expensive methods of driving traffic to a site. If you’ve got the time, you can learn a lot of the tricks of the trade and do it yourself for next to nothing. If you hire a company to do the work for you, the pricing can range, but you can often get results by paying a few thousand dollars upfront and a few hundred a month--a pittance compared to traditional media costs.

Explosive growth: As the number of pages on the Web grows, so do the number of pages indexed by the search engines. Several engines have moved from the millions of pages indexed into the billions. With this kind of clutter, high rankings are no accident. They have to be thoughtfully planned and executed like the other tactics in your marketing mix.

Despite the compelling arguments above, proportionately speaking, there are still relatively few companies taking advantage of search engine optimization today. It may be that they don’t understand it, and therefore, tend to be intimidated by it. Like most things in life, once you dive into SEO, it really isn’t that difficult. There’s a wealth of information available, of all places, on the Web. And a good SEO provider (Top 10 Internet Consulting is our partner) can help to educate you and explain what they’re doing in non-technical language. Your goal should be to get your Web site ranked in the top 30 listings on as many of the most-used search engines as possible, using as many relevant search terms as you can. I use the "top 30" metric because, according to industry leader Search Engine Watch, only 7 percent of searchers will go beyond the third page of listings. So if you’re not in the top 30, you may as well not be there at all."