Most people who are new to website building have very little idea how or why it is important to get their website indexed by the major search engines. What we mean by "indexing" is simply the process by which the major search engines find a website, analyse its content, and enter a summary into their database so the site becomes eligible to be listed when people search for that kind of information.

One of the most pervasive bits of misinformation concerning the indexing process is that you should "submit" your site to the search engines on a regular basis. According to people who sell this bogus service, the search engines spend their day waiting for website "submissions", which, once received, they obligingly go look at and then index, presumably with no concern for the quality of the site in question.

But the fact is, search engines are very busy little beavers. They are not sitting around waiting for submissions. On the contrary, they are constantly out there scouring the web so they can keep the most up to date database possible.

In many cases new information gets recognized by the major search engines within hours of being posted. Take news sites, for instance. In order to keep abreast of breaking news, and to make their news services relevant, the search engines have to be crawling these sites several times every day and be constantly updating what they find. Otherwise their "news" results would be of very little value.

On the flip side, given their preoccupation with sites that are regularly changing and being updated, if a site is rarely changing or being updated, it is not likely to get regular visits from the spiders. Why would they waste their time?

So if you are a webmaster wanting to get traffic from the search engines, this should tell you something quite important: keep your most important pages fresh and updated. Give the search engines a reason to come back and look at them again. Regularly add content, and keep fine-tuning the "relevance" of your content.

Another important fact about search engine behavior has to do with the importance of links. Normally search engines index pages because they have followed a link from an already indexed page.

So it stands to reason that the more links you have pointing to a given page, and the more significant those links, the faster that page will get indexed, the higher it will get ranked for your most important keywords, and the more often it will get visited by the search engine spiders.

Once you are indexed, regular submission of the kind offered by bogus "site submissions services" is not going to help you. What will help you is regular updating of your pages and getting more links. The search engine spiders will follow the new links and have even more reason to visit your pages more frequently.

If you give the spiders something new to chew on when they get there, so much the better. As they learn that your pages are worth spidering (because your pages regularly change and contain useful content), they will get crawled more often.

What this means is that the best way to get a new site, or a new page indexed is to create a link from an already indexed page. But bear in mind that if the page that contains the link rarely gets crawled, it may take quite a while before that link is of much help to you.

When people speak of "quality links" they often fixate on the page's Google Page Rank. But while Page Rank is important, it does not tell the whole story. Often a link on a page with no PR at all will still send the spiders your way. It just depends how often that page gets crawled. For instance, getting your link on a blog page -- even a brand new one with no PR -- is usually a very effective way to get search engine attention. The reason is that the search engines often visit active blogs on a very regular basis.

Among other things this should tell you that exchanging links with other sites and having your link end up on a relatively useless "link page" is a very inefficient way to make an impression on the search engines.

An easier and much faster, more efficient way is to buy quality links from a link placement or text advertising service. For example, buying a listing in a syndicated blog that gets crawled on a regular basis will have almost immediate impact. The blog entry will get crawled very quickly, and if it is syndicated so your link is live on additional sites, that will give you even more search engine exposure.