The search engines continually scour the internet finding new websites with software called Spiders or Robots. So they'll find your site on their own. However where your site shows up in the search results is entirely up to the search engine. Search engines rank your site based on several different factors and each search engine ranks websites on a different basis. One way called "Link Popularity" pioneered by Google, is to look for other sites linking to your site. They consider that a vote for your site. So having lots of sites linking to yours is the same as having lots of votes for your site. So if you have more votes for your site than your competition, theoretically your site should be ranked higher in the search results. If the text used in your pages reflects what the end user was searching for. This type of search engine placement is called natural inclusion.

We use a service that will submit your website on a monthly basis to over 1,000,000 search engines and directories. The benefit of the submissions isn't that people can search at those one million sites, the benefit comes from all those sites linking or voting for your site. There is a nominal monthly fee for this service.

The other way to be including in and guaranteeing high placement is to actually purchase keywords used in the search engines. This is done by bidding on keywords against your competition. Which position your bid comes in determines where your site displays in the search result. For instance if you bid $0.20 for the keywords "great product for sale" and your competition bids $0.21 then your competitions site would display just above yours. However you only pay the $0.20 if the end user actually clicks on your link and visits your website. And you can control how much you would like to budget for click throughs to your website. Say you only want to spend $5.00/per day for click throughs. Once your budgeted amount has been reached for that day, the search engine stops showing your link.