Increasing search engine visibility

Probably the question I most get asked is

"WHY CAN'T I FIND MY SITE ON GOOGLE"

or

"HOW CAN I GET MORE TRAFFIC"

This is probably the hardest area to understand when constructing a site here are a few basics and useful links

Google Yahoo Bing and other search engines

Do not expect your site to appear on the search engines "instantly"
They are good but but not that good.
The web is very very big with thousands of new sites being created every day !
It might take up to a couple of months until the search bots discover and crawl your site.
Setting meta tags for description helps as does a descriptive title.
Also you can try adding your site manually

Google Yahoo and Bing all say that THEY DO NOT USE THE KEYWORDS META TAG but anything that could help should be used so add it anyway FAR more important are the TITLE and DESCRIPTION of a page. They should be concise and relevant to the content of the page
You can set title , keywords and description for any html page from the Page options
You can also set default values for title description and keywords from the site options in the settings
Search engines should (no guarantees) use the description and title when they finally list your site.

Search engine pages about meta tags

There are a whole load more meta tags you can add to your pages
THESE TAGS WILL NOT IMPROVE PAGE RANK Although many may be referenced by search engines
or serve other special purposes
For example
Author <meta name="Author" content="Author Information"> Stop page being crawled (no guarantee) <meta name="robots" content="noindex , nofollow" />

Toplists directories
social media sites
guestbooks and forums

Join every good and genuine one that you can find
Join Mobpartner create facebook and twitter pages and add their buttons and widgets to your site
Post your url on as many forums and guestbooks as you can get away with but do not spam them
The moderators or admins may ban you or delete your posts if you post spam on them

It is very important to understand that content is a priority in any site.If you put in enough hard work to provide your users with quality original content, your site will eventually attract attention and become popular.

Images and Image search

The images on your site are another tool in improving your visibility. give them proper names and alt texts that actually mean something.
for example "little_fluffy_bunny.jpg" means a lot more to a search engine than "lfb001.jpg"

More useful links

Google WebMasters
Yahoo Site Explorer
Bing webmaster tools
ask.com webmasters
Seologic.com
Wikipedia's list of search engines