Getting high scores on search engines

I have just made a web site and I want to know how to get it onto the search engines. Do you need to pay. Any ideas please.
Many Thanks

Answer: No. Google will webcrawl your website itself based on the # of hits it receives, your new site will become an eBay in a zillion years.

i know there are people in the business of improving google ratings, in exchange for a fee

There are tons you can do. Just don't pay for any service. It can be done for free.

Read up on Search engine optimization (SEO), go to http://www.webmasterworld.com , make an entry on DMOZ. (its difficult, so read up on it). Getting on DMOZ helps because other search engines and directory listings gets the data from there. Its a slow process, sometimes takes half a year, so apply early. Its free.

Make sure you generate a sitemap and submit it to google. Signup for adsense if you wish. Google adsense will tell you that getting on adsense does'nt help in your ranking, but ignore that. Just by getting adsense in your site, it will get their bots to crawl your site instantly cuz they have to generate keywords and will make they crawl regularly. Its a quickstart for a new site.

Check out the Search engine relationship chart here. Its one of the basic vital things you need to understand.

http://www.bruceclay.com/searchengin...nshipchart.htm

Even a search of "search engine relationship chart" in google gets you lots of info. Read it all.

Anyways, all of above is enough to get you started. There's lots you can do. Just gotta read up on it. There's lots that I did'nt post here. You can take it as far as your want.

"High scores" is that what people are calling it nowadays?

Wanna know a few ways on how you can check if your efforts are working?

- Put the statcounter code in your website. http://www.statcounter.com/ Its one of the best free ones out there. It will give you statistics of the number of people visiting your site, where they found your link and what keyword they used in search engines to find your site. Among other things.
- Put google analytics also on your site. http://analytics.google.com These guys are great for long term reports.
- Check your pagerank. http://www.prchecker.info From what I understand, the PR rating is exponential, so it takes time to jump from one to the next. Inbound links (to your site) from a site which has a high PR rating is a good thing. One of the ways which google judges the importance of your site is, how many good sites links to you. And likewise, if you get lots of "low quality" links from link farms, google actually looks at that as a bad thing. Very much in real life, its about who you know.