Currently, there are only three major players: Google, Yahoo and MSN Search. They are responsible for the bigger part of the search engine traffic you can get because they also power other search engines, for example the search engine on AOL.com displays Google results.
Then there are search engines that are not so popular but they can bring you some additional visitors, for example Ask Jeeves and Teoma.
In addition, there are country specific search engines. If you have a German web site, you should also submit to the popular German search engines, for instance Fireball.de. If you have a Indian web site, you should also submit to the popular Indian search engines, for instance 123khoj.com.
Directories are different from search engines because all web site submissions are reviewed by humans. There are several directories where your web site should be listed. The most important one is The Open Directory Project at www.dmoz.org.
You should also submit to topic specific search engines. If your web site sells garden equipment, you should submit your web site to specific garden directories. Even if they don’t send you some visitors, they could improve the link popularity of your web site which helps to improve your ranking in other search engines.
You can refer to search engines directory to get more details about search engines and web directories. In the search engine finder, you can find a list of all important search engines and directories. It also lists country specific search engines and special interest directories.
Google PageRank (one word) is the measure of an Internet page based on the number and importance of a site’s incoming links. It is expressed as a numerical value, from PR0 to PR10, with PR10 being the highest possible PageRank (PR). Very few websites achieve that PR 10 level, of course.
Each level is more difficult to reach than one previous. The system is based on an exponential scale, similar to the earthquake Richter Scale. The only difficulty with the Google PageRank scale is no one is entirely certain how the numbers are calculated.
Incoming links for web pages are, in the opinion of Google, votes in favor of that page. On the other hand, Google considers some votes to be more important than others. The simple number of incoming links to a page is calculated by Google, but the relative importance of the “voting page” is given even more weight in the mathematical formula.
The pages that are considered to be more important votes, in turn increase the importance of the page they link. More important pages pass along more voting power. This is measured numerically as PageRank. Higher the PR higher the Search Engine Ranking
Note carefully, that PageRank is for each individual web page, not the entire web site as a whole. Every page in the Google data base has its own PageRank. Sites don’t have “rank”. Every separate page, however, on your website has its own PageRank.
Always keep in mind that PageRank is not the same thing as your site’s ranking on the search engine results pages (SERPs). They are entirely separate items. PR is the relative importance of a page on the web, expressed as a number. The SERPs are where your site appears on a search for your keywords.