i dont know how do web search engines work and i wanna know if when you first upload your site to the web it can appear in a search in one of those engines (google, yahoo...)...

if not, what is needed to appear in them??

and last what do exactly do for the meta tags in an html document with respect to this...

thx

First about search engines in general; at the moment there are only 2 search engines you want to concentrate on i.e. Google and Yahoo. There are not only the 2 most popular search engines around but they are also most often the service provider to some other smaller and/or lesser know search engines like MSNSearch.

MSNSearch is planning to roll out an engine of their own but I'll think about it when I see it and you should too!

Very quickly, once you've built yourself a website, you can just submit the URL to your homepage to both Google and Yahoo. Then you try to get your link (to your homepage) showing on a 3rd party web page that you know has been already indexed by any one of these search engines - e.g. in your signature in a thread here on GIDForums™.

Search engines regularly send out their bots /spiders / whatchamacallits following links off web pages already in their index; this is when you want your link on some of these pages; so these bots follow up on the links they find and land on your homepage! They grab the contents / links off your homepage and adds them to the index. Now with links to the rest of your site, these bots start to process your other/internal pages over time.

This can take anywhere from days -> weeks -> months. So normally I don't expect much (and neither should you) for at least 3 - 4 months.

Then there are other details to think about but perhaps I should leave that for another day...

The MSNbot is sucking away at my bandwidth...it better get me some good results in the eventual MSN search engine.

Search engines use automated software programs knows as spiders or bots to survey the Web and build their databases. Web documents are retrieved by these programs and analyzed. Data collected from each web page are then added to the search engine index. When you enter a query at a search engine site, your input is checked against the search engine's index of all the web pages it has analyzed. The best urls are then returned to you as hits, ranked in order with the best results at the top.

Very Interesting, so your saying that just having a link to my website in a forum post, can somehow help my ranking on Google or Yahoo search engines if that post is somehow referenced out on the web already? Not totally sure I understand.

Surge,

Generally speaking when a search engine bot spiders a webpage, it follows the outbound links and spiders those sites. Hence you can have your website spidered by getting links on other webpages.

Thank you. I'm really starting to feel like this is a good forum. Just joined here this week.

Hello SURGE,

Not every forum post (and not just any forum)... but it can happen.