YOU love your family. So much so that you've spent hundreds of dollars on digital cameras, video cameras and computer software just to put up a website dedicated entirely to the Tan, Lim or (insert your family name here) clan.

You upload audio clips of your first born's first words, pictures of Uncle Pek's 80th birthday and videos of your clan's outing to Sentosa. Now all you need is for people to come to your website.

Tough.

There are about three billion websites on the Internet, making the odds that a casual surfer would stumble onto your site about 1 in 3,000,000,000. The odds of striking the Toto jackpot, on the other hand, is 'merely' 1 in 8,145,060.

Your website, however, need not spend its digital life in a cyberspace black hole. Here's how you can increase your website's chances in the Internet Toto:

Get listed

THE simplest thing you can do is submit your website address to all the major search engines. That way, your website is at least catalogued in some database rather than floating aimlessly in cyberspace.

Almost all search engines and directories have a link on their site that lets you add your website to their gigantic indexes.

However, Mr Vincent Sim, head of marketing at Microsoft's MSN Business Division, explains that having your site listed does not always guarantee a placing in the engine's search results.

This is because of the different ways search engines rank, sort and match the search queries with the sites in its database.

Getting listed is like joining a lottery. Having a ticket doesn't mean you will win, but without a ticket you have zero chance.

The name game

NOW you're in the cyberspace Toto, you need to improve your chances of winning.

You can do this by choosing the right numbers, or in this case, the right title for your web page. The web page's title tag is one of the first things search engines look at.

The trick is to make your page title as relevant to your content as possible. So if the page contains pictures of Mark Tan's first birthday party, you can name the page Mark Tan's First Birthday Party Photographs.

That way, your web page will turn up when surfers run a search on Mark Tan, Mark's Birthday Party etc. But if you decide to get creative and name the page Isn't He The Cutest, chances are people who want to find your page using the same search words will not find it.

Words are the key

LET'S say your lucky number is 13, and your astrologer tells you 13 will definitely be one of the numbers picked at the next Toto drawing.

The first thing you would do is buy all your Toto tickets with the number 13 in them. The same goes for getting your website hit.

Other than the title tag, search engines also rank results according to how frequently the searched keyword or phrase appears in a website, explains MSN's Mr Sim.

The more frequently and the higher up in a web page the keyword is, the higher it appears in the search results rankings.

So if you want Mark's birthday photos to rank high in the search results, pepper his name and the fact that it's his birthday liberally in the body of your web page.

Start linking

ANOTHER way people increase their chances at Toto is to pool their money to buy a big stack of tickets.

Similarly, you can increase the chances of your website being hit if you pool with some people and have them link their websites to yours and vice versa.

That way, visitors to their website have a direct link to your site.

Building links to your website helps in another way.

'Search engines explore the web by starting with pages they know about and following the clickable links on those pages to find new ones,' explains Mr Jonathan Glick, Director of Internet Search at Overture Services. 'The more pages that link to your site, the more likely that search engines will find your site when they crawl the web.'