How Do Search Engines Find My Website?
Believe it or not, you don’t actually have to directly submit your site to a search engine. More often than not it will come and find you from links on other sites.
They find you either from links on another site (this is called ‘organic’ traffic) or a direct submission to the search engines database using an ‘add url’ link on their site. You can also use a service or a piece of software that submits you to several (or thousands) search engines at once. Please do watch out for some directories as they tend to either send you spam themselves or sell your email address to others to spam you.
What types of places are there to submit my website?
Directories (free and paid). Search Engines. Individual sites. Free For All (FFA) pages.
What is the difference between a directory and a search engine?
In simple terms:
A directory only stores links that you or someone else submits to their database.
A search engine normally follows a link that you, or someone else submits and then looks at all the other links on that page and follows them one by one until they get a list of all the pages on your site (sometimes this is called spidering or crawling, hence the terms ‘I’ve been spidered or my website has been crawled’).
Search engine spiders very rarely crawl every page of your site – they do it in batches. Depending on how ‘important’ the spider thinks your site is, depends on how deep or how many pages it will crawl.
If you have a busy site with lots of visitors and you are adding content very regularly – the spider will come visiting more often and will crawl more pages.
Getting links back to your site from your friends or forums you visit often are very good ways of getting the search engines to come spider you more often.
It is all about popularity. The more popular your site is, the more the spiders love you.
This Article was written by Steve Dorrington (AKA CarpetDog). Steve regularly contributes to the Get Your Site Indexed blog. He’s also written an ebook called The 48 Hour Plan – How to get your website indexed in 48 hours or less.
Great site. Good advice. Its a numbers game, the more your site is submitted, the better chance you have of getting your site to the top.