Q: I’m still trying to figure out, what exactly is a search engine spider?

A: A spider is a program that search engines use to read web pages. A spider is also called a bot or a crawler. When you submit your site to a search engine, the spider reads your pages by looking for relevant keywords and search terms as well as for hyperlinks. If your text, documents and links jive with the algorithm (formula) of the search engine, then your site is indexed (listed).