A search engine is what people use to find pages or sites on the Internet; think of it as an index of all the web pages in the world. You type in keywords such as "Painters" and it will find all the pages that contain the word "Painters" and list them.

Search Engines systematically "crawl" through the Web and add pages to its index (Similar to a librarian cataloging all the books). There are several hundred search engines available and more are appearing every month.

Search Engines are the most common way of new visitors finding your web site. Search Engines on average account for 85% of all your traffic. So being listed in the top Search Engines is crucial in any Internet Marketing Strategy.

Every search engines works slightly different to one another, no two search engines will produce the same list. It normally takes months before a search engine finally "stumbles" upon your site. Registering your site with search engines will greatly speed up the process because they will actively "look" for your site.

A Search Engine Optimisation and Internet Marketing program are essential in maintaining your position on search engines rankings. The methods in which Search Engines rank their pages are all different, a highly guarded secret, and are constantly changing to provide more relevant results based on different criteria.

Cairns Web can explain and provide more effective exposure of your web site, on a long-term basis.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is where Cairns Web systematically go through your web site examining the content to assess how well your web pages are laid out for Search Engine visibility. We will usually make some changes and fine tune your web page to increase its' ranking potential with minimal disruption to the layout of your site.

Now that your page has been Search Engine Optimised, Cairns Web then submits your site to the major Search Engines for their consideration.

All our submissions are done manually to increase the chances of having your site listed. We do not employ the use of Search Engine Submission software which submits your site to over 1000's of sites.

There are only a handful of major Search Engines and they together account for over 80% of all search requests over the Internet - that means the other 988 search engines only account for 20% if that. This does not mean we do not value the traffic these other search engines can generate but they are not our first priority.

The search engines are obviously bombarded with registration requests as the number of sites and pages continues to grow explosively. Most search engines will queue submission requests and deal with them in turn.

The following table indicates how long it normally takes for your submission to be processed and for your site to be included in the search engine database.