How it Works
Each time a search is done the search engine can not go out and check every page online for comparisons. So they use Robots or automated programs also know as spiders to "Crawl" websites and save the content of its pages in a huge database. The database is literally the entire Internet on one computer.

If your website was "Crawled" or accessed by the robots 3 months ago, the content in the search engine database is exactly what was on your page 3 months ago. This makes the searches slow and cumbersome and it often takes 3-6 months before you see a change in your pages in the search engines. Even if the search engine crawls your site today, it could be several weeks before the new content that it retrieved is updated in its search database. This time is greatly reduced based on your search ranking. A powerful website could have content updated daily, where a smaller less active site could take 6 months or more.

The search engine has limited resources and spends its time working the more active websites and won’t spend precious time indexing 5 pages sites that have no valuable content or relevance to its users. With billions of pages to index the search engine will choose the pages that have better content based on their own personal opinions (also know as search algorithms).

The search engine knows to check your website as soon as you register your domain. You do not need to submit the website to the search engine; however you can suggest the site to each search engine if you think it will help. You may also want to submit your site to industry specific searches that do not use the whois database. For example if you make aircraft parts you may want to find searches that only deal with aircraft and aviation. In those instances you will need to submit your site to that search.

Search engines try to sort through billions of pages to bring relevant results on searches to the users. That means that every time you do a search it has to check the data on over 4 billion pages. The trick is to be number one of those 4 billion pages.

To accomplish this task the search engines use over 100 parameters to rank your website among the 4 billion others. The actual formulas and parameters are kept secret and change as much as the weather. This is done to prevent exactly what you want to accomplish, getting that top listing.

If it was easy, the only sites that would come up would be the companies that spend millions of dollars building their websites and would know the best formula for getting placed highest. Your website would never have a chance to be placed in the results.

But that is not the case, so even experienced teams of high paid webmasters and statisticians are kept confused. So you do not have to feel like you are at a disadvantage, its intentionally confusing to make the playing field more equal for the small website with relevant content. But this means no one will ever understand exactly how the search engine works.