A friend was looking for an article he had run across previously called Five reasons why search engines hate you and couldn’t find it. So I came up with my 5 reasons below. He then found the article

I like my reasons better as I think they address the problem for the beginner a little better. But do check out the original article. It is good too.

First, some resources:

Google’s Webmasters Central
Google’s Submission Page
Yahoo site submit

And if you really want an education and to spend way more time than you need check out:
Search Engine Watch

Search engines are in it for the money, they want to provide good, relevant content so the end user is satisfied, but they want to do this automatically with their spiders, so this is why the 5 things I talk about below matter.

1. No descriptive keywords in title or text or url
Use the keywords that people will use to find you in your headline, description, meta tags, and if possible, domain name and url. Of course they keywords have to be in the content on the site.

2. Duplicate, Bland content.
If the end user is not going to like your site, why should the search engines? they want to provide value to their users and will thus always be updating their algorithms to give the end user the best possible results.

3. No one else thinks you are important enough to link to (no backlinks)
Search engines use number of links from other sites to yours to determine how good your site is.

4. Page stays unchanged for months/years
Search engines love pages that get updated constantly. Like Blogs.

5. You don’t think you are important enough to link to (no youtube videos, twitter, ustream.tv shows, facebook, myspace, or other social media/web2.0 pointing to you)
This is a great way to get backlinks that search engines love. Use the social media sites!