So you have a website up and running and everything is setup exactly how you want it. Here comes the next step, getting visitors to your site.

The biggest hurdle in having a website is attracting visitors to your site but how do get these visitors find you?

Search engines.
Before a visitor can find your site, a search engine has to find you and list it as one of the websites to crawl or spider. Indexing is when a web crawler or spider goes thru your site and reviews all the relevant keywords, links, and information contained on your site. Some sites are crawled on a daily bases, some on a monthly basis.

Why? Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches.

So how does a web crawler get to your website? Here are a few solutions:

Submit the site for indexing. Fire up your browser and search for submit website. Browse thru the results and submit your site to these directories to get listed. Make sure you suggest your site to Google, yahoo, msn as they are the key players. There are some sites that will submit to thousands of other directories for a fee.

Link swapping and Back Links. When search engines index a site, they follow the outgoing links. If you have a buddy who has a website and is listed in Google, make sure he adds your link. You can also pay companies to add your link to their site or directory for a fee. If you do pay someone, try to get a relevant site (a site similar in nature as yours. Example: if your site is about the Spiderman movie, try to get a link from another movie site or related to Spiderman) with a high Page Rank.

Press Releases (optional): press releases will bring some hype to your site. If you can afford a press release, then do it. You will get some high PR sites pointing to you. Also people who read the releases will be curious and will visit your site.

Word of mouth is perhaps the strongest form of advertising. As time passes by more and more visitors will find your site and you will gain popularity. Search engines serve the purpose of helping surfers find you; the next step is keeping those visitors to your site. All you need is patience, time and consistently updating your site.