There are eight elements that are required to get listed and ranked by major Search Engines and Directories, like Google, MSN, AOL, Yahoo, Excite, Looksmart, Lycos, Netscape, All-The-Web, Ask Jeeves and many others.

Those elements are: Statistics, Content, Meta Tags, Submission, Reporting, Links, Tweaking and Patience.

Getting listed and ranked by major search engines does not happen by sheer luck. It takes some organic (on-going) effort. Web site owners who wish their sites to show up, when people are searching the engines uisng keyrwords/phrases, need to pay close attention to, and address the following major elements.

Statistics - The first step is to monitor your web site and see how much traffic you are currently getting and from what sources. How much traffic comes from Search Engines and which ones produce the most traffic is critical information. You can automate this process using tools such as Web Trends. Analyzing the traffic report can also tell you a lot about its. For example, if you find out that most people are "entering" to your home page and "exiting" from home page, that tells you that visitors do not find your site serious, or attractive, and you need to improve the look&feel of the site, or improve its usability.

Content - Your web pages should be content rich. This means that your pages must be well written and based on the keywords and phrases that best describe your company's products or services. As an example, if you make "copper jacketed clamps" and "heavy duty vises", you need to write a web page specifically for those phrases and other keywords/phrases related to your business.

Meta Tags - Meta tags are the HTML codes that go at the beginning of your web page that list your title, description, keywords/phrases, and other important elements. Not all Search Engines use Meta tag information. However, the ones that do will rank your web site high, if you use the proper tags.

Submission - Submission is the manual process that requires submitting your URLs to the Search Engines in which you want to be listed (indexed) in. After you submit, some Search Engines can take weeks or months before your web pages are indexed. You will want to submit every month or so until you see that your web pages are being listed. When you do get listed, your listing might start out low, but with on-going tweaking, your pages should rise up higher in the rankings.

Reporting - Keep a monthly record of your ranking for each keyword/phrase on all the Search Engines you submitted your site to. Using this report you will always know how well the pages are ranked. Over time, this report will help you determine if you need to make any further changes to your pages to improve their ranking.

Links - Creating links going from your site to other sites, links on your pages (linking pages within your site), and links from other Web sites that directly point back to your web pages are very important. The more specific (based on your keyword/phrase) these links are for a particular page, the higher ranking you will get on Search Engines like Google and others.

Tweaking - It might take a few months before your pages are indexed by the search engines. Once they are indexed, and positioned, it will be time to decide what changes are necessary in order to obtain an even higher ranking. Remember, it is an organic process. These changes might require modification to the page content, and tweaking the HTML code and Meta tags.

And finally, Patience - Getting your pages to rank high on the major Search Engines will take patience and persistence. The process of making your pages Search Engine friendly (optimized) is an organic process. Therefore, one has to stay with the process for as long as it takes. The results are well worth the effort.

Hadi Shavarini is the General Manager and co-founder of Blue Robin Inc.- Building eBusiness Infrastructures. Hadi has been involved with web development since mid '90s. http://www.bluerobininc.com