Search engines drive 50 to 80 percent of website traffic. Searching is second only to email as the most popular online activity.

There are basically three types of search engines: Those that are powered by robots (called crawlers; ants or spiders since they crawl over the web looking for pages); engines powered by human submissions; and those that are a hybrid of the two.

The 3 most important search engines to optimize for are Google.com, Yahoo.com, and MSN.com. (Google owns over 50% of the search market today, and is growing fast. With international searches, some say Google.com’s traffic is 60% of all searches on the internet.)

Major Search Engines and Directories:

• Ask
• All The Web
• AltaVista
• DMOZ
• Exactseek
• Entireweb
• Google
• ISEDN
• Lycos
• MSN
• Yahoo!

The objective is to make Google.com, Yahoo.com, and MSN.com, and the other major search engines and directories "see" your website pages.

When you query a search engine to locate information, you're actually searching through the index that the search engine has created —you are not actually searching the Web. These indices are giant databases of information that is collected and stored and subsequently searched.

For your site to be elevated and rank high in the search engines, your site pages must get into the search engine indexes. A long term approach to SEO or Search Engine Optimization work is needed. If you can give the spiders what they want, your website will rise up in the search engin results pages.

You can expect to see some of your website pages listed within 2-4 months, and an additional 6-8 months for other keyword phrases and website pages.

Google.com alone claims to have 8 billion pages indexed. Using Google.com alone is not sufficient. Less than half the searchable web is fully searchable in Google.com. Studies show that about half of the pages in any search engine database exist only in that database.

Getting a second opinion, from another search engine or directory, is well worth your time.

All search engines consist of three parts:

• a database of web documents the engine has indexed
• a search engine operating on that database
• a series of programs that determine how search results are displayed.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is to ensure that your web pages appear at the top of the search engines for target keyword requests. It increases brand awareness, qualified traffic and revenue. Fact: Only 1/2 of the people visiting look at the sponsored (paid) ads (PPC) and only 20% of those actually click. However, 4 out of 5 total clicks - apply their mouse on natural search results. Therefore SEO/SEM done correctly will increase your website visibility and your business revenue.

There are also industry specific search engines for listing your website:

• Business SEs
• Foreign SEs
• Health and Medicine SEs
• People SEs
• Reference SEs
• Regional US and Canada SEs
• Science and Technology SEs
• Sports and Recreation SEs
• Travel SEs