What is referencing on search engines?

The term referencing refers to submitting your Web pages to the search engines. This is done to get your site indexed by the search engines and Web directories, so that people can find your site using random keywords or key phrases. Referencing can be handled by hand or using professional software to automate the process.  

What are search engines?

Search engines gather, sort and report information from the Internet, based on your topic of interest. 

There are basically three categories of search engines:

1. Spiders, such as Yahoo, Google, MSN and AOL.
2. Directories powered by humans such as Open Directory (DMOZ).
3. A combinations of both spiders and directories.

There are also pay-per-click search engines that allows you to pay for top positions using various keywords, such as Google

How do search engines work?

Search engines crawl the Web looking for new pages to add to their database or index on a daily basis. Once your pages are added to the index, people can search keywords on the Internet to find a site that best match their search criterias. Matches are ranked / positioned in order of importance (algorithm). The exact rules they use to rank pages for relevance are usually kept a secret and often change.