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What is indexing?

Search engines use automated software programs known as "spiders" or "robots" to survey the web and build their databases. Web pages and other documents on the web are retrieved by these programs and analyzed. Data collected from each web page or document is then added to the search engine's index.

When someone performs a search using that search engine, the keyword(s) they are searching for are checked against the search engine's index of all the pages and documents that it has analyzed. URLs (links) to the documents that the search engine deems as most important for your search are returned to you, ranked in order with the "best" results at the top.

The goal of search engine optimization is to determine the keywords that people are most likely to use to search for sites like yours, and to attempt to get your site ranked as highly as possible for those keywords.