You heard for mysterious creature that visits your website and indexes it. What we are really talking about is software – the crawler or spider – whose job it is to read the text on your website and index it, or add it to a database.
When you submit a query (type a keyword into the Search box) to a search engine or directory it searches through its index, or database, for the most relevant matches to the keyword rather than searching the Internet. Searching the Internet would take weeks or months, not fractions of a second.
There are many business cross-relationships between the various search services. Some of them are owned or partially owned by other search services, others license search engine software or directory listings from each other. In many cases, submitting your site to one search service will get it indexed for other search services. Although many search services may use the same index or database the results you get will vary greatly because of the methods and rules the search service uses to query the database.
Getting your site indexed is not that difficult. Search engine submission is a process where the site owner or a paid service requests that the search engine crawlers visit a site and index the text on the site. Many people assume that submitting a site to a search engine is all they need to do and the search engines will place them as the one of the first results on whatever words they want. If only it were that simple…
Many of us receive unsolicited email from businesses offering to submit your website to over X thousand search engines for only X dollars. In reality, you can buy software for your own use for about $50 – $150 and submit your own site as many times as you want. This software has many benefits including the ability to submit your site to tens of thousands of smaller search engines, but unfortunately the most popular search engines have blocked these automated submission tools and they require you to manually submit your site to them, one by one.
Submitting your site to a search engine does not guarantee you any preferred placement, in fact it does not guarantee the search engine crawler will visit your site although most search engine crawlers will eventually visit your site and index it. In order to have the best chances of good placement we must optimize our web page content.