How useful are Meta tags? Which is better for submitting sites: directories or search engines? How do I get my dynamic site to register?

As Search Engine Watch guru Danny Sullivan puts it: "It's not that easy unless you consider your site as a pyramid that can be accessed at any point."

Sullivan gave the keynote address Thursday at this year's Search Engine Strategies show in San Francisco. The two-day seminar is hosted by INT Media Group, the parent company of internet.com and this site.

In his signature pep talk, "Back to Basics," Sullivan advised both search engines and companies submitting their URLs to keep things simple and direct. Similar to a news headline, the important things should be at the top.

"If you only had ten words that would describe your business, what would they be?" says Sullivan. "If you have good descriptive content it will make it easier for people to find you."

Ranked into either directories such as Yahoo! or MSN or search engines like Alta Vista or Google, the industry doesn't seem to be completely affected by the economic slide that other Internet pure play's have suffered in the last two years.

"Everybody on the Internet is searching for something," says Sullivan. A statement that is backed up by metrics that ranks Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN as consistently pulling in high click-through numbers for search queries.

The show itself has evolved into quite a showcase for search engines, most notably this year were the announcements by AltaVista about its new "Trusted Feed" program and Netscape, a subsidiary of America Online, which announced an upgrade to its search engine.

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The secret, say most companies, is to appease editors by keeping descriptions for submissions to about 15 to 25 words long and incorporate your key terms

The reason being is that more of the top search sites have teams of people to review site suggestions for spam-like material before posting.

"You would be surprised the amount of submissions we get that look good in the search engine and then bump you to another site that has nothing to do with the original link," says AltaVista director of search services and Web marketing Chris Kermoian.