Q: How do I get the search engines to put my pages higher in the search results pages?

Do NOT Submit: So how do you get listed in the major search engines? You DON'T pay someone to do it for you. Those spam emails just want your money like all the other spam emails. You don't buy a program that will auto submit your URLs to the major search engines while you sleep. (They don't like those programs and most won't take any submissions from them.)
Overall… you don't need to submit your pages to the search engines. They will find them on their own. They send out "spiders" that run around the "web" and grab pages as they find them. As you do more of what is written below… you will get more hits from readers and higher ranking in the search engine results.

Meta tags: How to use HTML meta tags:
http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/article.php/2167931
Note: Be careful what you put between the TITLE tags. This is what will appear at the very top of people's screens when they have your page up. It is also what it will say when you save the page in your bookmarks. It will also help you rank high in the search engines. So, even if your account name is howdyfolks, with your hosting service, you want your page to be seen by the engines as This Is The Name Of My Group.
Note: Most often asked question: No, the header section of your code where the metatags are, doesn't show up on the page to your reader. Everything there is for computers to read the info behind the page. Only the title line shows up.... at the very top of your screen when viewing the page online. The only things showing up on your actual page, to the reader, are the items you have coded between your open and close body tags.

Be Seen: There are two ways to be seen... people find you from your description and keywords on a search engine... or people find you from a link on another page.
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.
Note: The more links there are out there to you, the higher you will rank when search engines return results from pages that share your keywords.
Note: Remember I said spiders crawl around the web archiving pages for search engines? Well, they might find you in one day or 6 months. So if your page is new, it's very important to get and give as many links as you can right away, especially with other highly hit pages.
Note: Ask me if you don't know how to make a link on your page so the click on opens in a new window and the reader keeps your page on his desktop. Don't be afraid of sending readers from your site when it's easy to keep yourself there and provide tons of useful information to the reader as well. It will keep him coming back to you instead of having a page that once it has been read or scanned, they don't need to come back.

Navigation: Remember to set up your page with a great navigation system. No reader should ever have a page in front of them with no place to go next. Either have a navigation bar at the top, left, or bottom of each of your secondary pages that looks just like the one on your main page. At the very least a HOME link at the bottom of each page.

Content: Keep content fresh and informative or readers have no reason to come back to your page. Your secondary pages will seldom, if ever, be updated. Your main page should never have an "updated date" on it to make you look stale. Also avoid showing "counters" as those are yesterday's trend, and may keep readers from coming back if you don't look "big" enough to bother with.

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Cnet:

Keywords: Key to success

It’s important to employ the words and phrases that searchers actually use in your Web pages and title tags. The right keywords can mean the difference between 1,000 page views a day and a mere 10. NicheBOT is a great free tool for keyword research: with it, you could find out that Web searchers use the phrase “antique telephones” 10 times as often as “antique phones”–vital information when you’re writing the content for your site. Wordtracker is another wonderful keyword tool.

A word of caution: trying to cheat the search engines–by getting a ton of incoming links or “stuffing” your meta tags with oodles of keywords, for instance–will likely get your site penalized by the search engines. It could disappear from the search results entirely.

People have tried all sorts of tricks, such as loading a page with “invisible” keyword-laden text. If someone suggests an SEO trick or shortcut to you, research the practice before implementing it on your site. Google offers plenty of tips for Webmasters at its Webmaster Help Center. Yahoo’s Search Help section does as well, and MSN Search offers tips, too: go to http://help.live.com, click Help, then choose Windows Live Search Site Owner.

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