During a recent three month period, Insight Analytical Labs, Inc., a local semiconductor failure analysis firm, received over 500 visitors to their website from just one search engine. That's right, search engine listings are free, and the most popular search engines can drive hundreds of visitors to your site. These search services are popular because they are easy to use and very fast. A person simply enters a few words related to a desired topic, hits the search button, and voile, up pops a list of websites relevant to the search criteria entered. It's easy and effective.
Search services maintain massive databases or indexes of the websites on the Internet.
To be included in a search engine's index, the website owner must submit or register their website address with the search service. A search services may find a website by accident, but odds are a website won't be indexed until formally registered. Upon registration of a website, the spider program will automatically visit the site and index the web page contents. Web surfers will then find the site via keyword searches. Examples of search engines are AltaVista, Excite, Lycos, InfoSeek, HotBot, WebCrawler, AOL NetFind and OpenText.