I started a tiny hobby homepage / website in January.

I read horror stories that it was very difficult to get on search engines like Yahoo; at least six months, maybe never. There are even companies that specialize in getting sites on search engines, especially the first page, by using various dirty tricks.

I searched for my homepage yesterday, after two months, and it's all over the place. I haven't done anything, it just happened.

So, don't worry, be happy, it's easy.

I don't want to be accused of spamming my homepage, but if you really want to know, it can be found in the "Teaching in Thailand" forum, Important topics, Support materials galore (at the end).

I guess it depends on which search terms you are competing for. Especially if you try to sell something you will have a hard time competing against major and established web sites since your ranking will be much lower than theirs.

Never was involved directly with search engine optimizations other than technical (URL rewriting and html optimization), but I'm sure it is pretty tough nowadays to fool Google into boosting your ranking when your website is not really popular.

Loved the spammers' comments on a blog I found the other day, they would write English prosa about just anything before posting the actual link. Not sure this is to fool Google or to bore the moderators enough so the stop reading before exposing the comment as SPAM.

welo