Some engines/directories NOW make a charge just to consider listing your site.

The information/procedure is slightly different for search engines and directories (some individual ones may also vary from this guide), so use this as a 'rough' guide only.

Note with all search engine options the site design/coding remains essential for good positioning and is slightly different for each.

Search engines
Payment can be made for each page you want indexing (either per month or per year) but note they still do not give a guarantee for positioning or ranking. Some will guarantee fresh indexing of pages within a certain time scale (ie 2-7 days) and offer listing enhancements such as features links, company logo and custom headings.

This option is a good idea if you want to be included in a search engines database however it does not guarantee you will will appear high in the results list or at all. The benefit with this option is that you avoid having to wait (3-8 weeks) if you wish to correct/improve your ranking.

Examples:

Tip: Search Engines usually use a Spider (or Crawler). This is a software solution "tuned" by humans to index web pages. A spider/crawler goes to your site and finds (=crawls) your pages. It then stores those pages in a database for future retrieval. Your site needs to technically meet the various criteria for search engine inclusion/placement.