How Do Search Engines Find My Site?

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Come to think of it, how do search engines find any site?

First You Need To Tell Them!
All major search engines have a facility for web site owners or other web surfers to tell them about web sites and web pages which they think should be indexed.
With any new site, it is advisable to tell the search engines about it, and the same hold true for most new pages of existing sites, subject to our advice given in the other pages of our site.

Three Elements
Search engines have three major elements.

Spiders
First is the spider, also called the crawler. The spider visits a web page, reads it, and then follows links to other pages within the site, and also to other sites. This is what it means when someone refers to a site being "spidered" or "crawled." Some spiders return to the site on a regular basis, such as every month or two, to look for changes.

The Index or Catalogue
Everything the spider finds goes into the second part of a search engine, the index. The index, sometimes called the catalogue, is like a giant book containing a copy of every web page that the spider finds. If a web page changes, then this book is updated new information. Sometimes it can take a while for new pages or changes that the spider finds to be added to the index. Thus, a web page may have been "spidered" but not yet "indexed." Until it is indexed -- added to the index -- it is not available to those searching with the search engine.

Match Finder
Search engine software is the third part of a search engine.
This part of the search engine attempts to match the data in its index with whatever you typed in as a query. It could be called a report generator, because for its output, it produces a report. The important point is that there are so many millions of pages on the world wide web, it needs to find matches to a search and rank them in order it believes is most relevant.