Gerard,

>I am still a bit confused. Is it sufficient to just put certain tags on your page to qualify to be included in a search, or do you , in addition, need to register with the search engines.

Built it and they WON'T come, unless you tell the search engines that you exist by registering with them, or if someone's page that IS registered contains a link to your pages.

Some of the engines will "crawl" the web, jumping from link to link, and you might eventually end up on a few engines if other sites contain links to your site. Otherwise, they won't know your page is there.

Each engine builds its own "index" of the web, by following links or checking out page addresses that are submitted to them. Their automated robots will go look at the page, extract info according to their current formula, then add it to their database -- sometimes within 24 hours, and sometimes a couple of months after you submit.