Unless you're working on a secret project, you probably want people to be able to easily find your website. If they type some search terms into Google that are related to your site, you want your site to come out on the list of recommendations Google gives them.

Generally speaking, the best way to be one of the top recommendations from a search engine is to have one of the best websites in your particular subject area. Digging a little deeper, though, here are some specific tips that may help:

First, make your website accessible to both your human visitors and the "web crawlers" or "robots" (website scanning programs) used by search engines. Besides just following web standards (for example, using well-formed HTML, or better yet, XHTML/CSS with semantic layout), this means not "hiding" links that you want people and robots to follow inside fancy Macromedia Flash objects, making any part of your site accessible from any other part with just a few mouse clicks, and so on.

Then, tell the major search engines that your site exists! Here are some links to pages that will let you do this:

• Tell Google about your site
• Tell MSN Search about your site
• Tell Yahoo! about your site (requires logging into Yahoo! first).
• Get your site listed in DMOZ, the Open Directory that is used as a reference source by many search engines, as well being used directly by humans.

Next, most search engines rank websites based on how many other websites have links to yours; this is because it stands to reason that the better your site is, the more people will link to you. To improve your ranking, you therefore want to as many other websites link to yours as possible. The best way to do this is to make your site such a useful resource that other people will want to give their friends and customers a link to it.

Because people search for website by using "keywords", hink of the keywords someone might use to try to search for your website; then make sure you use those words and variations of them in your site, preferably on your main page.

Consider paying search engines to show ads for your website when people use certain keywords. Depending on the keywords you want to advertise under, and the geographic area you want to advertise in, this method of advertising can be suprisingly inexpensive. Two of the best programs for this kind of advertising are Google AdWords and Overture (owned by Yahoo!).

Finally, it's worth noting that there are lots of techniques people sometimes use to cheat search engines into giving their sites higher rankings--for example, hiding hundreds of repetitions of key words on a page by making them the same color as the background, so that search engine robots will see them, but humans won't. DON'T DO IT! Because these policies "pollute" search engine database and make searches less helpful to people, all the major search companies have policies against doing these things, and will completely remove your site from their search engines when they catch you. We also recommend steering clear of "search engine optimization" companies; most of them are scams, and many of the strategies they use are specifically those techniques that search engines will ban you for. There are some reputable optimization companies that will help you improve the structure and wording of your site in legal ways that can give you better search performance. . . but "let the buyer beware", and good like trying to tell the reputable companies from the con artists!

One quick side note: sometimes you don't want search engines looking through some of the pages on your website. You can control which pages the "robot" software used by search engines will look at by creating a "robots.txt" file, or by setting the "meta" tags in the HTML code for your site. Information about how to use these methods can be found at the Web Robots Information Page. IMPORTANT: nothing physically forces web page scanning programs to honor your requests to not look at certain pages; spammers, for example, widely use web robots to scan pages for email addresses they can add to their spam lists, and they will pay no attention whatsoever to your robots.txt file--they may even use it as a cue as to where the "juicy" bits of your website are. If you don't want something to be publically known, don't put it on a web page!

If you're looking for a much more in-depth discussion of how to make your website attractive to search engines, check out this article. Also check out WebmasterWorld, a site that has lots of news and discussion forums for people designing websites.

Despite all these tips, remember: the best way to get ranked highly by search engines is to simply have the best content!