The way search engine indexing works is roughly as follows:

a) You visit a search engine that you want to register with, and click on a box labelled "Add URL" or "please index me", and complete a form there.   Some of these forms include a request for some text that you would like to appear, others are as simple as typing in the URL of your "home page".

b) A while later (sometimes as long as 6 to 8 weeks), the search engine visits your home page.  From there, most of them also browse any linked pages on your site, and if they like what they see they'lladd you to their indexes

c) Once indexed, visitors to the search engine who look for a series of words that all appear in one of your pages will be directed to that page, perhaps along with thousands of other matching pages

d) Good search engines will re-visit from time to time to eliminate  pages that are no longer available, and to find new pages that  you've added.

In order to help search engines know what you do and don't want  indexing, web sites that are to be registered should have a  robots.txt file present before the search engine visits to index. Although this is described as the "robot exclusion file" because it tells engines where NOT to go, it is a good idea to have one as certain search engines take its very presence as a clue that
you know about searches, and they won't index if it's missing!

Other things for you to think about before you indes your site - make sure you have good mentions of all the words you want to nbe found on in the page, use <meta tags to set keywords and descriptions that some (but not all) search engines look at, etc.

Just to stress a point - getting good search engine ranking and coverage is a long term process.

Good content that is kept up to date and has additions made from time to time will be spotted by the better engines and they'll raise your profile. Also if you can persuade others to link to your site, and you link to the sites of others, they will see you very much as part of the web community and be pushed up the tree.

To some extent, once you get the ball rolling it can gather something of a life of its own.  Search engines do note which sites people click through to, and those that have a heavy click through rate will tend to be pushed higher up the rankings.

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All you need to know. We consistently get Number 1 listings for our main keywords for our websites.

A lot of cowboys over here in Ireland sell people a webpage for Euro 1500, and then leave the poor sod to sink on the engines.

Our pricing structure for a website is roughly 1/3 development, 2/3 promotion. If people are not interested in paying for the promotion, we bid them a polite 'au revoir'. We say 'au revoir' because we know they'll be back in a year or so asking about promotion. Happens all the time.

rgds

Alan

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