Know the Engines

We could spend some time here and spout off some of the standard wisdom about what search engines uses what rules to index documents.

But in my experience, this information is generally unreliable. Most search engines are very secretive about the indexing rules they use. Some will publish one rule and use another. Some change their rules all the time.

The only reliable way to figure out how each search engine works at any particular time is to compare search results.

(The easiest way to do this is revealed in Tracking Your Progress.)

What do they have in common? Do the first documents all have extensive keyword meta tags? Do they have long descriptive titles with lots of keywords?

Using this method, you can figure out what a search engine is looking for at this particular time. Modify your pages to accommodate this and then submit. Once your pages are spidered, it will probably be a while before they are automatically re-indexed. So, it's OK to change your page once you are sure it has been spidered by that particular engine. Why change it? To submit to the other search engines of course.

Changing your page is not the only solution here... More to come.