You website will eventually be found search engines by their spiders. Spiders most commonly finds websites by following links from other websites that are ranked. "Found Pages" is the term used to describe the information that is collected.

Some search engines have a system for submitting your web page address. The best method is to submit the home page for your website and the spiders will subsequently find other pages after indexing the main URL.

Submitting multiple pages of the same website or submitting a website multiple times are techniques frowned on by search engines. We suspect that some search engines penalize pages submitted versus those found by the search engine spiders on their own. So please be cautious about orchestrating an overly aggressive search engine submission program. Also, beware of using automated tools to submit your site to the search engines. This too can result in penalties.

So What Gets Indexed?

When a search engine indexes your pages, the entire page itself does not actually get stored. Rather what happens is that information on your pages, what words appear and where actually gets stored. Since searches employ the use of words, search engines mainly care about the word content on a website. Therefore, images, scripts and rich media (such as flash videos) may not be search engine friendly, although that is changing and some handy SEO tips will follow.

In addition to the text of your website, some search engines store the content of your META tags. There is more information on META Tags in Chapter 7, but in brief, META tags are still important must include information about the website, products, services or ideas.

Along with the indexing of text content and META tags, search engines also store information about the hyperlinks on each page. Search engines use this information to determine the content of a web page as links typically are related to the subject of a page. This also assists the search engines in determining the link popularity of a website as well as the significance of the pages linked to by each site.