Top placement on the most popular search engines is an essential ingredient for a successful website. Most surfers barely look beyond the first two or three pages of results from a search (usually 30-50 links). Is your company's website appearing there? Is your competitor's website?

Search engine placement is difficult to say the least. Each of the seven major search engines use different criteria to rank the websites they index and that criteria changes frequently.

Recommended Resources:

PositionAgent, monitors where your web site is ranked on leading search engines for selected keywords and reports all listings and positions to help you get more hits.

Recommended Websites:

Search Engine Watch
Mecklermedia's comprehensive guide to search engines and directories will teach you how to use the various search engines and how they rank websites.

Recommended Articles

Referrer statistics may be a leading indicator for portal success
From Jakob Nielson's excellent Alertbox column.

Recommended Books:

Search Engines for the World Wide Web: Visual Quickstart Guide
Another quality book from the Visual Quickstart Series. This book is an excellent guide to using search engines effectively. Concisely covers the more popular search engines (AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, InfoSeek, Lycos, WebCrawler, and Yahoo!) as well as more than 30 specialized search engines and directories. Also covers special searches such as images and mailing lists. At less than $14, this book is a must-have.