i have done a few websites for people and have never had any success with search engines they have been registered with the main search engines google,alta vista etc.  I have filled out the meta tags with lots of keywords. 

Some advice would be much appreciated

Search engines like to see meta tag keywords within the first few line of content, and also within the page title if possible.

They often do not scan an entire page, so if you have 500 lines of javascript in the header section, they probably won't get as far as the body. Frames are a no-no as well. the engine only see's the container page which doesn't have any relevant content.

In the old days, people used to repeat keywords at the botton of their page in text that was the same color as their page background. The engines will now punish you for trying to spoof them like that.

Good site on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is at http://www.searchenginewatch.com/ - http://www.searchenginewatch.com/

If you'll peruse the html and webmaster news groups, you'll note that one of the big reasons (among many) for not using frames is the problems search engines have with them.

Most major crawlers do not assign a lot of weight to meta keywords tags now-a-days. IIRC, Imktomi based crawlers are the only ones still using meta keywords. Meta description tags are still referenced by most of them.

See http://www.searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/article.php/2167931 - http://www.searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/article.php/2167931

Times change, and so do search engines. What worked well in the past often doesn't any longer. SEO is a process, not an event. You need to review your engine rankings and crawler methodologies every six months and adjust.

I had no problem just adding it at the google add url page.

http://www.google.com/addurl.html - http://www.google.com/addurl.html

google is nice enough to provide a listing for free. But don't expect to get a good listing without dipping into Miss Piggy.

Try and get other web sites to link to your site, google will rank you higher for that.

If you have more than one domain such as .com and .co.uk dont have them linking to the index. have just say .co.uk link to index page. them .com to a splash screen which will then link to your main index.

watch using querystrings. They can trip up the google crawlers. there is software that can be installed on a web server which makes querystrings crawler friendly. If ther is anywhere in your site that could make a spider enter a loop tr and avoide this. To do so use a javascript link to that particular part of your site.

Use words that you have used in your keywords meta tag in places such as image alt tags-every little helps.

Also marking text up with tags such as <h1> and <b> boosts its relevancy from normal page text. So maybe put page titles in <h1>. But try and make sure only about 5% of text on each page is marked up.

Actually, google rate paid an non-paid ratings the same. It's just that if you paid, your site will get in faster, while non-paid sites can take up to 6 months to index.

The best way to get your site to the top of the listings is to get as many people as possible to link to your site. That boosts your PageRank in Google.

Another thing is that if your webhost provides a search engine submission service, USE IT! I used my host's service and my site got indexed the next day!