Site Submission
Search engine companies use 'spider' or 'bot' software to trawl through the web looking for sites to index. There are billions of pages already and you may wait a long time before your site is indexed - if it ever is. To improve the chance that a search engine will list your site in search queries, submit your site to that search engine. This just involves filling in a form with your Web address aka url = Uniform Resource Locator and perhaps some information about your site - note that some sites recommend that if your address ends .com, .tk or .co.uk etc (anything that does not define a particular page as in http://www.google.com/about.html) that you add a trailing slash in the style of www.jednet.co.uk/
Submit your site to If you have a business, or clients that do, consider the free Submit your site to Don't submit your site to |
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Your site will rarely be added instantly. It can take four weeks or more with some companies. Submit a rough homepage with meta tags early in the production process and continue work on the rest of the site so that everything comes together on launch day. Poster ad campaigns frequently employ 'teaser ads' where they hint at something good that will be worth waiting for.
Do the same with your temporary index page and then replace it when the site officially goes live. No 'under construction' sites - active Web sites should be adding and editing content regularly to keep it fresh and maintain search engine ranking. The search engines come back to re-index frequently so the rest of your content will feature soon and in the meantime at least you have something up there to lure people to your site.
Some search engines also encourage you to add their logo and search facilities to your site (see my homepage for an example of Google search within your site.
Google Website Optimizer Google +1 
iconstock free variations on the +1 logo Google's take on 'like'. DMoz - the Open Directory Social SEO
Meta Tags
Meta tags are invisible to the person browsing the page, but help the search engines to show you relevent results. They have been abused to the point that Google and others pay much less attention to them and more to the actual content of the page: title tags, alt image text, and the search terms in the context of the page, especially within heading tags. Also inbound links from higher ranking web sites. NB don't try to be sneaky trying to hide white text on a white background as the search engines will assume you are spamming them and your ranking will suffer! SearchEngineWatch advice.
