Upon completing a website, one of the first things you will want to do is make sure that it is visible to the public. If people aren't aware that your site exists, you will have quite a time getting any business. There are plenty of search engines out there that are crawlers and will find your site eventually. However, if you know how these work, you can take full advantage of them.

About 85 percent of people peruse the Internet by using search engines. You type in a keyword or phrase based on the information you are looking for. After you click "search," a page will pop up consisting of ten or twenty sites that relate to your words. The crawlers search your site for potential keywords. If you work with a marketing company, they can help develop your site so the crawler gets the most pertinent information.

If you aren't familiar with marketing, or with how search engines work, it can be difficult to optimize your page for search listings. When a Google spider comes through, it will read words that it considers important. It will ignore such words as "an," "a" and "the." An AltaVista spider, however, will read all the words. A Lycos spider sticks to the first 20 lines and the 100 most frequently used words.

Getting Your Site Listed

Certain companies specialize in marketing your site. These are experts who know how to deal with many search engines that all have different ways of ranking. They'll list you as regular links and as sponsored links with tons of search engines. Regular links are the ones that pop up and take up most of the page. Sponsored links will generally pop up in a column on the right hand side. These are known to have a relationship with the search engine and are sometimes considered more trustworthy.