Indexing:

Indexing is the automatic collection, compilation and organization of ‘meaningful’ words (keyword s) that can be used by a search system to retrieve pages.

Search engines send out automated programs called bots (short for robots) or spiders which crawl through the web, visit websites and compile full-text databases of the content they find there. Additionally those bots follow the hyperlinks within a website and thereby arrive at new or already indexed websites. For new websites they create a new database, for already indexed ones they update the existing database for this site if the content has changed since the last bot visit.

The database compiled on such a bot visit is added to the existing database of all other websites. At this point the new website is indexed, i.e. included in a search engine’s database and henceforth can appear in the search result pages (SERPs) when a user performs a relevant search, i.e. the entered search phrase matches one or more of the collected keywords for this site. The position it takes amongst all other relevant sites for a specific query depends on the algorithm with which search engines evaluate their databases and how well the site is optimized for a given keyword (for more information check the entry under SEO).

There is a quite common misunderstanding amongst Internet marketing beginners who think that submitting their new site to as many search engines as possible is the same as getting them indexed and is a sure way to generate traffic. They therefore fall for so called submission services who promise to submit their site to thousands of search engines and directories and resubmit them in regular intervals. Often they charge a considerable fee.
What they don’t say:

• With Google , Yahoo! and MSN there are basically only 3 really important search engines which handle 99% of the world wide search traffic. Hence submitting to another 997 search engines will not make any difference in traffic.

• Submitting a site only means that you notify a search engine that there is a new site and ask them to send their spiders for indexing. Whether the search engines comply, and when, is up to them. You don’t need an expensive service to submit your site. For Google you can easily do this yourself here .

• There are better and faster ways to attract the spiders, that is placing links to one’s website on sites which are often visited by the spiders. www.blogger.com , Google’s blogging platform, would be one example for such a site.

• Resubmitting a site again and again can be rather detrimental as this could be considered as spamming by the search engines and get the site banned!

• Even when your site is indexed you still won’t get any traffic if it is returned as for example #1.345.411 out of maybe 10 million results for a user’s search query. To get traffic from search engines your site must make it at least amongst the top 30 so it would be displayed on one of the 1^st three SERPs. Hardly a user checks results beyond that point. Most of them look only on the 1^st SERP. Therefore only effective SEO measures – the more competitive the keyword the better they need to be – will finally take a site to a point where it receives search engine traffic.
  

[Indexcomes from Latin index= forefinger, sign, pointer, list (e.g. of a book’s content); later use as a verb meaning “to compile an index”]

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