Listing your Future World site with a search engine directly is very easy. However, unlike the early days of the Internet, listing with a search engine doesn't usually produce a whole lot of traffic for several reasons:

(1) Many popular robotic search engines, such as AltaVista, Excite, and Lycos can only list simple, HTML-based sites that contain only text or pictures. More complex, CGI-based sites, such as your Future World site use underlying product databases, shopping carts, and commission allocation software. CGI-based sites are are often unreadble by these search engine robots. Unreadable sites are usually not listed on any of the "search engine results lists". We'll show you how to work around this limitation later in this article.

(2) If everything goes well and your listing appears prominently in a Search Engine's result lists, it will still only account for about 2% of the total business your site is capable of receiving. Search engines listsing, banner ads and classified ad links on-line used to work very well when the Internet was new. Today, no successful company is able to rely on on-line promotional methods exclusively. Direct Mail and classified or display ads in popular magazines pull 20 to 50 times more business than any current on-line promotional method. So, while it is fine to list your sites with Search Engines, it is important not to expect an enormous response from doing this. If you want to build a profitable on-line business, you'll still need to use other, more effective advertising methods to successfully promote your new site.

(3) Search engines only list the first 100 or 200 listings for any particular search word or phrase. If you are not in the first 200 listings, your listing cannot be seen. In you are not in the first 30 listings, your listing probably WON'T be seen. (Search engine users are impatient and seldom look past the first 30-or-so listings.) While it is possible to get into the first 200 listings for some words or phrases, it is almost impossible to get listed in the first 30 listings. Large companies with full-time "search engine managers" dominate these top positions for most common words and phrases. And, even if you get into the first 200 result listings for a particular word or phrase, it is very hard to stay there with hundreds of thousands of new sites listed every day.

WARNING: Some companies charge more than a hundred dollars to "list" your site with several hundred search engines. Were you to attempt this, one month after doing so, you would probably find that the traffic to your Personalized Future World site would not have measurably increased. Most of these services will submit your site to all these engines. But, few of them will ever get you a high enough result listing to be visible in the first 200. So, avoid these services. List with the top 10 search engines yourself and skip the others. Submission to search engines is free. Since search engines listing isn't going to produce huge results anyway, it makes little sense to pay for a submission service. A Personal submission almost ALWAYS produces a higher listing than a paid "robotized" submission service will.

Even though they will only represent a very small part of your business, search engines can be important. And, we want you to be able to use them.

Here are two ways to increase your response from search engine listings: