Want more visits to your website? Then be more linkable.

Here’s how search engines work. Spiders, also called crawlers or bots, crawl across the Web collecting keywords and links from web pages. Spiders navigate the Web using hypertext links the same way we do. Each time a spider finds hypertext on a page, it follows the link to the next page, collecting data as it goes. Search engines then take all the links and index them using proprietary algorithms. When you search, you are really searching an index compiled by the search engine and not the entire Web.

So getting listed in the various indexes is the first step. But it isn’t enough. According to Search Engine Watch, a leading authority on search engines, the biggest indexes contain over 500 million pages. Let's say I have a site about sock monkeys. A search for the phrase "sock monkeys" in Google turns up over 3,000 results. If you want to see all of the results of that search, you'd have to click through over 40 pages. Who's going to do that?