But, now, how will people find it? Usually through one of the internet’s search engines.

You can wait for the search engines to find your site, but that may take a long while. Or, it might never happen, especially if no other sites listed in the search engine link to your site.

If you are impatient, you can easily present your web site for inclusion by manually submitting the site to the search engines.

There are four major search engines you should know:

1. Google
2. Yahoo
3. Bing (a.k.a. Microsoft Search, Live Search, MSN Search)
4. Ask.com

Three of them (Google, Yahoo, & Bing) allow webmasters to create an account where they can control some information available on the search engines.

All four accept the submission of Sitemap files.  A sitemap is an XML file listing of all URLs for a site, along with some additional information about each page.  Visit http://www.sitemaps.org for more information.  Go to  http://mikedaub.com/sitemap.xml on my site to view an example.

If you would like to exclude files or directories of your web site from the search engines, they (probably) follow the robots exclusion standard. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org for more information.  Go to http://mikedaub.com/robots.txt on my site to view an example.

Google

Google Webmaster tools (and to submit sitemap)
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
You may need a Google/Gmail account to register

To submit website to Google, go to:
http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Yahoo

Yahoo Site Explorer (Webmaster Tools)
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
You may need a Yahoo account to register

To submit both websites and sitemaps, go to:
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

Bing

Bing Webmaster tools
http://www.bing.com/webmaster
You may need a Windows Live (Hotmail, MSN, .NET Passport) account to access the webmaster tools.

To submit your site to Bing, go to:
http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx

To submit your sitemap to Bing, go to:

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?sitemap=www.YourWebAddress.com/sitemap.xml

(replacing www.YourWebAddress.com/sitemap.xml with the actual sitemap address, of course.)

Ask.com

No webmaster tools.

No means of submitting single web pages.

To submit sitemap, go to:

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.YourWebAddress.com/sitemap.xml

(replacing the web address as above)