Once your website is ready, the next step is to submit it to the major search engines.
It is easy to submit your website to the search engines.
This can be done in less than an hour's time.
However, one cannot be certain when the website is listed by the search engines.
It may be hours, days or even months.
You can either do the submission yourself or by others offering such service.
First, how can you get listed by search engines? When we say submission to search engines, we submit the website to the search engine and from there the search engine will be able to obtain the URL of the website.
When the time comes, the search engine sends its spider or also known as 'bot' to visit your website.
During the visit, the spider will read and copy most of the information in your website, such as the text, links to external sites, title tag and some of the Meta tags.
Once it finishes with reading and copying, the information will be sent back to the central database for indexing later.
The indexing can occur a few months later.
These steps are then repeated with the links on your website.
It follows the link to the other websites.
Spiders are limited in their reading capability because it can only follow most of the basic HTML code.
Thus, if you are using fancy JavaScript for the links, the spider will ignore them because it cannot understand them at all.
It cannot read forms as well.
If you search online, there are a vast number of services available to aid with submitting your website.
There are some that offers submission to hundreds of search engines for a fee.
However, these are scams as there is no such amount of search engines exists.
You will only need to submit your website to major search engines particularly the Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Teoma.
You can also submit your website to directories as search engines will pick up URLs from directories.
Another way is to get links from quality websites with high rank in search engines.
Briefly, when you submit your website to the major search engines, it will read your website, indexes it and assigns a rank to it.
Submitting the website to search engines is for the search engines to acknowledge the existence of the website and it is not a guarantee of getting a high ranking.
There are other ways to increase your website ranking in combination with this step.