What I've learned about getting indexed and search engine rankings

Sorry I haven't posted in the last couple of days, I was out of town working. Anywho I read the book and did allot of reading online, and here's what I got. There are two major types of search engines, human powered, and robot powered. From what I gathered human powered search engines allow webmasters (someone who builds or maintains a website) to submit there site, the site will then be indexed (organized and stored in a methodical manner along with page location) upon a volunteer editors approval. The idea behind this type of search engine is that only useful websites will get indexed yielding more useful search results. I have never personally used one of these search engines but would imagine they are very user friendly. Then there's the big dogs like Yahoo, Google, and MSN. These search engines gather there information via spiders (robots that crawl through pages and spread off through the links in the pages) the spiders collect the text information from each page it visits, then indexes it based on that information. One spider can crawl over a millions pages in a day, not bad, not bad at all. However there can be allot of pages (millions) with similar content. In order to get referrals from a search engine you probably want to be within the first few pages of results. This is where a pages 'rank' comes into play. Each page is assigned a rank based on the number and quality of links leading to that page, update frequency, useful links leading from the page, relevance, uniqueness, and popularity (I'm sure there's more to it then that this is just what I gathered). The higher your pages rank is, the more likely it is that you'll be in the top of the search engines results for that topic. Getting indexed is easy I found numerous sites that will submit your page to 30 some search engines for free, or you can go to the search engines yourself and submit your site manually. However it could take time and it's not guaranteed that your page will get indexed. Some search engines only index your page if it was linked to your page from another page that is already indexed. Some search engines offer enhanced index services. Meaning that if you're willing to pay a certain amount of money you will be among the top. I am going to find out which search engines do that so I can be sure not to use them. I would like my search results to be based on the content, rather then the contribution.


So I did it, I figured out how to get my site indexed, it wasn't hard but I think that improving my rank will be. I am now going to research tactics used to improve ones rank without the aid of an SEO. Wish me luck.