Search engines that are spider-based, or crawler-based, automatically visit the various pages of a web site in order to compile their index listings. These kinds of search engines differ from directories, because by means of the crawling, you are likely to have a number of your pages indexed with them.

So, with a website that has been crafted carefully with pages that have been customized with search engine optimization as a goal, it is possible to rank highly in the free search engine spider-generated listings.

With good optimization and patience, it is even possible to achieve a top-ten position, which would put your page on the first results page, where everyone would prefer to be found.

The fact is that very few surfers will ever see a site that is not listed within the first page of the results in the top search engines. That is why it is so important to make sure that your pages are optimized so that you have a chance of getting included in that first page, which will give you plenty of free search engine traffic, of course depending on the popularity of the search term you are ranking for.

There is no doubt that in the internet world today, that the most important spider-based search engine is Google. More people search via Google than the number of people who search the other search engines combined, meaning that more than one out of every two people who are looking for something online will be using Google to find it.

So, it's a good strategy to optimize your pages for Google, and that in turn will result in sufficient optimization for the other top search engines for the most part. In addition, the Google search engine also is the generator that powers the listed results for a number of other services as well.

The best way to get a listing with Google, and get that free search engine traffic you need, is to get you site linked on other website. These are called inbound links when they are found on another site and point to yours, and because the crawler-based engines follow links from one site to another, this is why it is so beneficial to have links from other sites to yours.

However, just having a few links to your site is not enough in and of itself. You will get a better boost in your page ranking if the links to your site come from other quality sites with good page rank of their own.

And, one simple way to begin to get links to your site is with free search engine submission. This will essentially get your "foot in the door" by getting your site listed with various directories, which will in turn direct the spiders to your page for indexing on Google and the other search engines.

Even though that can give you a very nice start, you need to continue your efforts by always adding find good links back to your site and by adding quality content that is relevant to your topic. By continuing these efforts you will continue to find an increase in the free search engine traffic you enjoy.