If you own a website, hopefully you are familiar with - at least - the concept of search engines. Once you get your website live, search engines are what people use to find your site.

They bring your website to the attention of prospective customers. So, you should know how search engines work and how they give information to a user performing a search.

Search engines typically use tiny programs called crawlers or spiders to index your website - to get it into their database for display to users.

When you submit your website to the search engine, the search engine’s spider program will look through your entire site, reading your pages and categorizing them accordingly in its database.

Periodically, the spider will return to your submitted website and check for new and updated content. How often this happens varies from search engine to search engine.

It’s very similar to reading a book. Your website is the book, and the spider creates the table of contents. The table of contents is stored in the search engine database so users can quickly find content on your site.

By storing pages in its database, the spider makes your site available for search engine users to find.

When a users performs a search, the search engine is actually searching through its index of websites. It does not actually search the web.

For this reason, you will find that your content will not be visible via search engines immediately after publishing. It takes time for a search engine to find your site and index it.

This is important to realize. Web design and promotion takes patience and perseverance. If you expect immediate results from search engines, you will be disappointed.

So if you are trying to get listed in Google, Yahoo, Lycos, etc, be patient. If you want to speed up the process, you can manually submit your website to search engines. However, this will not have an immediate effect. Your site will still not be listed until the search engine’s spider has visited and indexed your submission.