Build it and They Shall Come

Remember that line from the old Kevin Costner movie "Field of Dreams"? Well, that may hold out for supernatural baseball fields, but all web marketers know its not that easy to get noticed in the great ocean of websites out there. Its even hard to get noticed by the search engines unless you do things right.

So how do you get your weblog noticed by the Search Engines? I would recommend the following process:

1. Work out which keywords are relevant for your blog. Make a note of these. You can research popularity of keywords using the tools at Overture.com, or simply by running queries on Google. I would recommend working to the goal of at least 12 keywords.

2. You need to optimize the code on your blog. Firstly the title of the blog should accurately describe your page with the most important keywords at the beginning.  Secondly work on your meta tags; write a description meta tag again using as many keywords as possible. Once this is done, create a keyword meta tag with all your keywords from step 1. Put a self referencing link (like this) on your blog with your chosen keywords as the name of the link.

3. Now that your blog has keywords, it should be indexed successfully by the search engines. This may take some time. However you can speed up this process by hand-submitting to as many search engines and directories as possible.

3.a I would highly recommend the submit free service at ineedhits.com. There is a paid version also worth considering as it is exceedingly good value and gives you good exposure - this is the only paid service I have ever used. The major Search Engines will scan these directories and be directed to your blog which will in turn be indexed.

3.b Now comes the laborious part - Hand Submission. Submit your blog to as many directories as possible. when prompted for a description use the one you created in step 2.
The two most important are Yahoo and DMOZ. For both of these you must first find a relevant directory and submit from that page. Yahoo will give you a lot of referrals, and DMOZ is important as this directory is used to form directory listings for Google, and many of the other major search engines. Be patient as DMOZ is run by volunteers it can be very slow to get listed. Here is a great guide to getting listed on DMOZ. Note that these two directories will only list your blog if you have a lot of content so don’t do this before you start writing your posts!
Blogs also have their own dedicated directories. Getting listed on these does not usually bring much traffic but will get your blog noticed by search engines who will rank you based on the number of incoming links you have to your blog. Here is a list of blog directories to start you off:

Blog Hot or Not
Blog Universe          
Blogarama       
Blog Search Engine
Blogwise              
BlogHop
BlogStreet                
BlogTree.com
eatonweb portal         
Popdex
blogdex           
Blizg
Globe of Blogs
Bloogz

Once you have done this, within a few weeks you will be indexed on at least Google and Yahoo, which are the most important to be listed on. The other search engines will follow suit. For more info on search engine marketing in general, take a look at e-consultancy's Search Engine Marketing Forum.