In the olden days of the net, circa 1997-1999, we small business types used to have a fighting chance to get our site listed in the major search engines. Well the year 2001 has now arrived, and with it has come the end of our fighting chance. Many of the major search engines and directories

Vive la difference Here we were, very complacent at the significant progress our site was making in the search engine placement stakes. Number 3 on Excite, with a number of hits coming in, number 7 on Northern Light, no hits from there, and so on. We were starting to get a number of hits from

It is a well established fact that search engines simply adore (relevant) textual content above anything else. However, in our experience many corporate web sites are at a loss when required to generate search engine optimized content, be it for cloaking, be it for more conventional techniques of

While all search engines use one form of caching or another to build their indices, some of them make a point of displaying cached web pages to their users. The commonly quoted pretext for this is that it offers searchers fast access to a page's content, making it easier to check out whether it's

A good automatic submission program is quite undetectable if you do it right. So what constitutes a "good" submitter? To qualify, the program must: - Convey the correct referral (submission) URL. - Transmit all required data (e.g. email address, where required). - Use the engine's specific