Hi sueboss1,
I'm not sure if anyone is qualified to know everything about search engines, but the black magic that once shrouded them is a little less mysterious now-a-days.
* It takes about 6 weeks for all of your hard earned search engine listing to take effect.
I have made it a little mission to find out as much about site indexing as I can and often read up on the latest press about Yahoo, Google, Ikotomi, Open Directory, etc...
There are really too many things to list in one post to encompass alll search engine listings and they literally change several times a year so I'll try and provide some of the top do's and dont's:
Do - Submit your site to leading search engines and resources but... no more than once in 45 days.
(don't know why the number is 45 but I was told that at a seminar. Read the information at the search engine first to clarify this point as it often changes)
At one point is was not recommended to submit to Yahoo more than once. I'm not sure what the policy is now.
Yahoo (http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/)
(Yahoo's a pain because they have paid submissions for commercial sites and can't seem to make up their minds about how it all works)
Open Directory (http://www.dmoz.org/)
(This is a great place to list because it is a resource pool that other search engines pull from)
Google (http://www.google.ca/webmasters/1.html)
(My personal favorite. I still haven't figured out what the frequency of listing should be with these guys but you should be ok with once in 45 days)
Also get listed within a group that represents your business or concentration. I have listed with a number of Biz-to-Biz listings that also get indexed by search engines.
Note: Re-submitting is important - I didn't submit to google during a period of time and my ranking which was at about #46 out of 96,900 slipped to #89 and is now back up to #71 one week after resubmitting.
Title:
It is most important that the titles of your pages are full of meta rich words. For instance if you are a car dealer in Portland Oregon you would want the title to contain words like - Your_name, Car, Used Cars, Automobile, Portland Oregon, etc... This will increase your chances of a return for someone searching "Portland Oregon Used Cars". The title tag has taken precidence over meta tags in order of importance.
Page Text:
Make sure that you have text on your pages. Comment tags used to be usefull when images made up the page contents but comment tags are largely ignored these days. As an alternative you can create a hidden <div>CONTENT</div> that will not be visible to web viewers but works like gold to search engine bots.
Link pages:
Insert a page in your site that has no text, no graphics, nothing but links to each and every page in your site, then have it linked to your homepage through a hidden layer with a hyperlink on it, or use the hidden layer trick and stuff links to all of your pages in the layer. Nobody will click the links but search engines will follow them.
robots.txt:
This is a text file that search engines will look for as soon as they visit the root directory of your domain. It sets out the rules that they can or cannot follow when indexing your site.
Meta tags:
Although not as important as they were several years ago, Meta Tags are still a good resource to include on your website. At minimum I would include "Description" and "Keywords".
For more info use search engines and search any of the 5 topics above.
I hope that helps,
Andrew