When you build a new house, it probably already has an address assigned to it. If you have a phone line running to your house, the phone company automatically puts your address in a phone book next to your name. Your name is then listed in the white pages in alphabetical order. This allows people who know your name, but don’t know your address, to quickly run through the alphabet and find your name and the address where you live.
Similarly, when you build a home on the Internet, search engines do not automatically record your site so that people who know your name or service can find your website easily. Much like getting a phone line and an entry in a phone book, you must actively tell Google, Yahoo!, MSN Search, and other search engines to add them to their listings.
Each of the major search engines has a short form (like the one here on MSN Search) in which I enter your address so that interested customers can find your website. Eventually, the search engines will visit your site, crawl across every link on it, and index all the text on your site which makes it available for searching. Depending on the engine, this might happen quickly, a few weeks, or not so quickly, a few months! There are a few simple tricks that will help get you started on becoming more visible to search engines that I will discuss in the upcoming weeks.