This is the second of Logged On's advice column on how to get your Web site listed on search engines.

Improving Your Listing in a Search Engine Index Regardless of whether you pay a search engine or submit your site for free, your site can be listed in the top search results. Several factors affect how well your pages will be read by the software or person who is evaluating your site for inclusion in a Web directory or index. The following tips can help increase your site's ranking in the major search-engine indices.

1. Pick strategic keywords.

How do you think people will search for your Web page? The words you imagine them typing into the search box are your strategic keywords.

For example, say your Web site deals with coin collecting. Anytime someone types coin collecting, you want your page to be in the top ten results. So those are your strategic keywords for that page.

Each page in your Web site will have different strategic keywords that reflect the page's content. For example, say you have another page about the history of coins. Then coin history might be your keywords for that page.

Your strategic keywords should always be at least two or more words long. Too many sites will be relevant for a single word, such as coins. Pick phrases of two or more words, and you'll have a better shot at success.

2. Put your keywords at the top of the page.

Make sure your strategic keywords appear in the crucial locations on your Web pages. A descriptive HTML title (not the default Welcome to my home page) is crucial. Failure to put strategic keywords in the page title is the main reason why perfectly relevant Web pages may be poorly ranked.

Search engines also like pages where keywords appear high on the page, so use your strategic keywords for your page headline, if possible. Have them also appear in the first paragraphs of your Web page.

3. Use meta tags.

Using meta tags in your Web pages can control the information that a search engine generates about your page.

The most important meta tags for search engines are the description and keywords tags. The description tag defines the description of the page for a search engine to use as its page summary. The keyword tag tells the search engine which keywords to list your web page under. For more information about meta tags, go to yahoo and search for HTML meta tags.

Although you should use meta tags, adding some meta tag code is not a magic potion that cures your site of dismal rankings. Excite indexes documents as users see them, so meta tags are not important, and the Excite search engine places more importance on the document title than the body text.

4. Use HTML text and links.

Changing your page titles and adding meta tags is not always going to help your page do well if the page has nothing to do with the topic. Your keywords need to be reflected in the page's content. That means you need HTML text and links on your page.

For example, sometimes sites display large sections of text in graphics. It looks pretty, but search engines cannot see the words in a graphic. That means they miss out on text.

Be sure that your HTML text is visible. Some designers try to spamsearch engines by repeating keywords in a tiny font or in the same colour at the background colour to make the text invisible to browsers. Search engines now know about these types of tricks. If the text is not visible in a browser, it won't be indexed by a search engine.

Finally, consider expanding your text references, where appropriate. For example, a coin collecting page might have a link to collectors. Expanding the reference to coin collectors reinforces your strategic keywords legitimately.

5. Submit Your main pages.

Almost all of the major search engines claim they will index your entire site if you submit your top level URL by following HTML links on a page you submit to them. But, the search engines also state that spiders usually only follow a few links on any given visit to reduce the load on your server. This leads to somewhat schizophrenic behaviour -- an aggressive, hungry spider voraciously devouring links on your pages, suddenly remembering Miss Manners and meekly scurrying away without even coming close to digesting all of the content on your site.

You can help the search-engine spiders by submitting Web pages such as site maps (make sure they include HTML text links). Submit the top two or three pages that best summarise your Web site and make it easy for the spider to see links to all pages on your site.

Submitting Your Site for Free After a lot of experimenting, I've found the best results come from manually submitting URLs to the major search engines. Submission programs and services are great for submitting to the hundreds of smaller search engines on the Web if you have a specialised audience such as the legal profession.

Read help for Web masters pages that the search engines provide. You will get a lot of good tips on things like keywords and meta tags, but most importantly, these help files tell you explicitly what to do -- and what not to do -- to improve your rankings in their index.

The following tips are for three of the well-known major search engines: AltaVista (Submit a URL at: http:/doc.altavista.com/addurl/) AltaVista will usually add a page within 2 weeks. You can submit up to 5 URLs to the Alta Vista Search index for free.

For more information about adding your site to AltaVista, go to: http:/doc.altavista.com/adv--search/ast--haw--addurl.html To see which of your Web site pages are indexed by AltaVista, use the search phrase url:your--domain--name.com or .bm(omit the http:/).

HotBot (Submit a URL at: http:/www.hotbot.com/addurl.asp) HotBot claims URLs will be included in the index within two months, but it is worth the wait. The Inktomi database underlying HotBot is used by Yahoo, MSN, and its parent company Lycos, so it's vital for your pages to be listed with them.

For more information about adding your site to HotBot, go to: http:/hotbot.lycos.com/help/addurl/ To see which pages are indexed, go to: http:/hotbot.lycos.com/help/checkurl.asp Yahoo (Submit a URL at: http:/docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest) Yahoo is the most selective of all the major search sites because sites are selected by hand by Yahoo's editorial staff. You have to tell them in which category you think your site belongs.

For more information about adding your site to Yahoo, go to: http:/help.yahoo.com/help/url Although getting your pages listed in the search engines is important, it should be only part of any Web site promotion strategy.

With nearly a half billion pages on the Web, your odds of being found via a search engine diminish with each passing day.

A single mention of your site in a newspaper or magazine, for example, can give you hundreds of new page views and a lot of repeat visitors. No search engine can even come close to providing you with that kind of valuable exposure.

Michelle Swartz's column appears on the first and third Wednesday of every month in The Royal Gazette's Personal Technology section. She can be reached at michelle ychristers.net