I'm sure you have used a search engine in the past and found the description to be anything but informative. You can also help people find your Web page by providing keywords that describe your page and help drive traffic to your Web site. I use the META Tag Analyzer available at Scrub The Web. There are really only two stats I keep track of, bookmarks and search engine hits. Your bookmarks is your reader base.
Search engines bring in the new readers.
As long as both keep increasing, you're on your way. While the META Tag Analyzer can help you place higher on most search engine, it doesn't work on Yahoo . This is because Yahoo is a directory and doesn't use spiders. A listing on Yahoo can bring you more traffic than any other search engine if you do it right. This is where having a name beginning with a number can help as Yahoo list numbers first.