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There are two ways to get your site listed on Google: Organic optimization and Google Adword. The most effective and economical way to get listed on Google is through organic optimization of your site.

Most websites are powered by either Google (represents more than 50% of the search engine market share) or Yahoo. Once you achieve a high ranking on Google, you will also rank high on all the sites that are powered by Google, such as AOL and EarthLink.

Google AdWord is a sure way to get your website listed on Google. Google Adword is a cost-per click (CPC) model, which shows top ads on the right-hand column of Google and its partners’ sites like AOL, AskJeeves, and EarthLink. With Google AdWord, you create your own ads by focusing on a set of specific keyword phrases. You also choose your own cost-per-click for a keyword and daily budget for any ad campaign. Simply set a daily budget and choose a maximum CPC from as low as 5 cents $50. You can also target your ads by location, countries or cities, or by defining your own area.

Until recently, Yahoo! received search results from Google, but not anymore. On March 2, 2004, Yahoo! announced the widely-anticipated news that it was parting ways with Google. It then purchased Overture, which owns AltaVista, FAST, and Inktomi, making them one of the largest sectors in the search engine universe. Yahoo! now provides results for Yahoo!, Overture, MSN, Alltheweb, NBC, InfoSpace, CNN, espotting, About, HotBot, and other distribution partners.

You can now get listed in any of the services that Yahoo! provides:

• Yahoo/Overture Site Match: Site Match is a service for web pages with URLs that cannot easily be “spidered” by Yahoo's free spider. It offers guaranteed indexing of submitted URLs and a 48-hour refresh, meaning that site content changes will be reflected within 48 hours (Planet Ocean).

• Site Match Cost: Overture Site Match inclusion requires a non-refundable annual review fee and a cost-per-click (CPC) fee that is determined by the category of your content. The annual non-refundable submission fee per domain is: $49 for first URL; $29 each for next 2 to 20 URLs; $10 each or 11th URL onwards. The cost-per-click pricing for hotels, which is in the Site Match tier 2 pricing category, is $0.30 per click.

• Benefits of Submitting to Site Match:

• Your listing will appear in the main body of the search results page
• Positioning of your site will be determined by the relevance of your site content to the user’s search request
• Listings are automatically generated based on web page content
• Guaranteed and quick inclusion
• Submitted pages will be indexed every 48 hours, therefore pages that change content frequently will remain relevant in the search

• Yahoo!/Overture Precision Match: Overture’s Pay-for-Performance Search is now called Precision Match referring to their standard pay-per-click service that allows you to bid for top positioning. These results are displayed on various partner sites throughout the web with the (usually) three top spots being listed as Sponsored Sites on their partners’ site and normally grabbing top placement above the so-called Web Results. To be ranked 1st under Sponsored Sites results, you need to bid highest for that particular keyword phrase. To see how much people are bidding for any particular keyword phrase, go to: http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/search/tools/bidtool/ and enter the keyword phrase you want to look up the bid for.

• Yahoo! Free Add URL: Yahoo! has come out with a new Add URL service replacing the old Inktomi Search Submit. This service should be used if your site is consists mainly of static URLs because static URLs are easier for their crawling-bots to index. This service is not recommended for dynamic URLs for the same reason. The link to add free URL is: http://submit.search.yahoo.com/.

• Yahoo! Directory Listing: This is a paid directory where you’ll have to pay $299/year to get listed. Submissions made to the Yahoo! directory listing will be shown under Yahoo! directory listing results.

In Yahoo!-related news, on May 27th Google announced a release of the Beta "Anti-Spy" Toolbar. This toolbar, Yahoo! says, will find and remove spyware and other unwanted programs from your computer. Pretty cool, huh? To learn more about the Anti-Spy toolbar, go to: http://beta.toolbar.yahoo.com/.