Search Engines

Search engine optimization means optimizing for search engines. Actually for that?

Here the market shares of the major search engines (Germany/Central Europe):
1. Google > 85%
2. Yahoo ~ 3%
3. MSN ~ 2.5%
4. T-Online ~ 2%
5. AOL ~ 1.5%
(Their data from Google, whose Marktanteil thus around 90% relate place 4 + 5!)

See, in fact it depends on is only a search engine, namely Google! There are more search engines tips on Google.
Forget search engines record software, with which you can register your site to 10,000 search engines. 99.9% of them are almost meaningless, a search engine entry is waste of time.
At all the search engine your site is not really necessary. If your site is linked at least once somewhere, she will appear sooner or later all alone in the search engine index, without search engine entry. Because a search engine bot follows automatically all links it finds. An account at search engines harm although nothing, but basically it is a waste of time. The entry in Web directories is much more important.
Careful how many result hit sign the major search engines for specific search terms. More are there, the more difficult it is to achieve a good ranking (see the first 5 or 10 hits). Here a very rough estimation:
up 50,000 hits: relatively easy, even without a special optimization
50,000 500,000 Hits: already more difficult, but with corresponding Know-How no problem
500,000-5 Million hits: hard work, long term possible
more than 5 million hits: hard predictable; possible with Know-How, persistence, patience and a little luck in individual cases
Of course, other factors play a role:
How relevant is your site on the topic you are looking for?
How often is it linked from other websites?
Are the sites of the competition also optimized?
What are topic relevance and link popularity of the competition?