Q. How long does it take for my website to show up in a search engine?

A. As long as there are no technical issues with the search engine spider following links within your site and you’ve been able to get web sites that are already in the search engines to link to your site, you should be able to find your site using specific search phrases within a month or two. If your site is brand new and if you don’t have any links to the site it could be much longer. As far as ranking well on general topics, it really depends how competitive the topics are, how much content you’ve created and how many good links to your site you have.

One thing you can do with Google is to sign up for a Google Webmaster Central account. Validate your site and submit a sitemap of all the pages on your site. In combination with getting other relevant web sites to link to you, it should make getting into Google’s search results happen more quickly than just submitting alone. You can do the same thing with Yahoo Site Explorer. Submit a list of urls in a sitemap file, validate and it may help your site get crawled more quickly. Although, links to your site is still the best and fastest way to get included.