The very first step is to get your website indexed by the major spider-based search engines. Getting indexed means a search engine has a record of your website and knows where to find it. Then, the spider-based search engines can scan (crawl) your website and establish your rankings.

There are 2 ways to get indexed by the major search engines:

1. Submitting your website to the search engines
2. Letting the search engines find your website

Submitting a website to the search engines is considered OLD TECHNOLOGY. Be very careful about enlisting a submission service. Many brag about how many search engines they will submit your website to, but most of these so-called search engines are nothing more than "Free-For-All" " (FFA) or "Link Farms" ". The conventional wisdom is these services can actually hurt your rankings. In some cases, Google.com has banned websites that associate with these FFA sites.

The much preferred approach is to allow the search engines to find your website naturally. That's as simple as having a link on someone else's website that points to your website. The only requirement is that the page where your link appears must be a page that is in the search engine index. When the search engine crawls the site, it follows all the links - to your website if a link is present.

You can get a few easy links from these kinds of websites:

• DMOZ (a major index with over 3 million websites. Google considers a link in DMOZ as a high quality link)
• Local city directories
• Industry directories

One final note. If you submit your website to Google.com and do not have any links from other websites, Google will drop your website within a few months. Their philosophy is that if your website is not connected to the rest of the internet and validated by others, your site should not be indexed. So get a few links and get indexed.