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There are many, many sites that will happily take your money and "submit your site to 50,000 search engines". Avoid them like the plague!
In the US today there are exactly two search engines that send traffic: Google and Inktomi. Google does not have a paid submission program, it searches the web for sites and indexes those it deems worth indexing.
Inktomi has, for the past year or so, also been searching the web for sites. They do, however, have a paid inclusion program that I have never felt the need to use. If you are interested in it do some reading on the Paid Inclusion Engines and Topics [webmasterworld.com] forum.
You should have the most common keywords near the beginning of your title. If you are selling "apples in walford", then apples will be the most common keyword. You will also want to place your most important keywords in your meta description and on the page itself. The closer to the beginning of the page, the better.
Before you submit your site to search engines make sure your pages are "optimized" for content and keywords. Also see if you can get some other sites to link to yours before you submit it to the SE's.
As for spending money and which engines to submit to...don't waste your time submitting to hundreds or thousands of SE's, you'll just get alot of spam mail. I personally don't recommend paying to get a site listed in a search engine. All of the major SE's have a free submit link somewhere. Dont forget to submit to the free directories also, and it's REAL important to read all the guidelines and instructions before submitting to the directories.
Good luck...
is the format I'd suggest for your title/metas, although no doubt someone will post to say the robots meta isn't necessary. This code should go on every page - your frameset pages and your interior pages. The keywords should be altered to reflect the content of your actual pages.
Users will only ever see the title of your frameset page. The search engines will see them all assuming that they are capable of spidering frames based sites.
Unfortunately, the engines will list your interior pages as orphans (without your navigation frame). It's one of the many drawbacks of frames based sites. You can get around this with Javascript though. If I were you I'd post a new topic requesting info about frame jamming scripts. If there's another name for them, maybe someone else would post it?
Google:
[google.com...]
AltaVista:
[addurl.altavista.com...]
AllTheWeb:
[alltheweb.com...]
Inktomi:
[submitit.bcentral.com...]
DMOZ:
[dmoz.org...]
Mirago [mirago.co.uk...]
Splut:
[splut.com...]
Great British Pages:
[great-british-pages.co.uk...]
Would be a good selection to submit to first of all. For more UK engines, search for posts on these forums from BobbyDavro who has compiled a pretty definitive list.
Although I've listed AllTheWeb, Inktomi and Altavista, you'll probably find that they won't list you for free due to lack of incoming links on your site. Either get more links and be prepared to wait, or go down the pay-for-inclusion route.
The problems of getting decent incoming link to your site? Join the club. There are loads of threads on these forums with good advice, but it does all boil down to research and hard work. There's no magic bullet.
Very good contribution. I just copypasted it on my site. ;)
>>although no doubt someone will post to say the robots meta isn't necessary.
I read a year ago it was required on homepage only for Inktomi. It would not crawl the rest of site without the robots tag. Not sure if it is still true. I use it to prevent spiders to index a given page.