So you stayed up late putting the finishing touches on your home page. You uploaded those perfect pages in the wee hours of the morning. You slept peacefully, content in the knowledge that you created a great home page.

In the morning, you asked yourself: how will people find my page?

If you have a business site, you can pay $200 or so per search engine to be isted.  These tips have to do with FREE listings.  Getting listed is both easy and important.

One Directory at a Time
There's nothing magical about getting your site listed on search engines: you just have to let them know your page is out there. You tell a search engine about your home page by visiting its Add URL page and typing in the info that it asks for. Easy! Here are the Add URL pages for AOL Search, Yahoo!, Excite and Google.

Don't despair if it takes several days for your site to appear on a search engine. After all, thousands of new pages are announced every day, so it can take a while for yours to appear. Also, some search engines are fairly selective about what sites they feature. Make sure to read the fine print to see if they guarantee all page submission will be listed.

Using a Site Promoter
Now, there are a lot of different search engines out there, and adding your site to each one by hand can be a bit slow. Thankfully, there's a solution. You can add your home page to many search engines in one swoop with a site promoter. A site promoter is a service that will announce your home page to many search engines. There are a lot of site promoters out there. A good one to try is AddMe, which announces your site to the top 25 search engines at once, for free.

Before you know it, people from all over will be visiting your home page.

(Taken from my Home Page Journal which is the AOL newsletter for helping with your AOL web site)
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