Some ideas for getting your very first site indexed

Unless you already have a website which is crawled regularly by the search engines getting a new website you've created indexed can be a bit of a headache. And using the tools supplied by the search engines for submitting a site for indexing can leave you waiting for weeks before anything comes for a peek at your work.
Search engines take longer to crawl sites submitted via the supplied tools in an effort to counter short lived spam sites or sites which contain malicious code. There is no penalty for using the tools but you will have to wait a few weeks, perhaps a month, before anything happens.
Getting your site indexed within a few hours / days however is relatively easy with a little imagination by getting links in from another site which is crawled regularly.

First though, why would a link found by a crawler on the Internet mean your site is indexed faster than by using the tools provided by the search engines?

Basically it boils down to trust by the search engine. A trusted site is unlikely to link to a site which the search engines would normally ban, indeed if the trusted site did it would damage its own standing with the search engines. So if the crawler finds a link on a trusted site back to a new website there is a very good chance the new website is worth indexing.
However if the site is submitted only via the tools provided the search engine then it must assume that the site may be spam or attempting to distribute a virus. As the crawler has not detected any links into the site (ergo no one may want to link to it and damage their own standing because of what the new site contains) then the search engine must treat the site as highly suspect.
These tools are only provided as a final option by the search engines for people who really have no choice but to submit their content via them.

So how would you get your site indexed via a link found on the Internet?

Well forget everything you may have read about SEO so far and just concentrate on getting a link to your site on a page which the search engines crawl regularly. It doesn't matter if it's marked 'nofollow', just that it's a link to your site.

Forum signatures and Blogs are often a good place to start but you could also spend some time writing an article with a link back to your site and submitting it to an article mill.
You should also remember that the link only needs to exist long enough for the search engines to find your site when your aim is only to get it indexed. One such example is Craig's List, where the link will remain visible to the search engines for about a month.

Tools that promise quick indexing or sites that offer 'free backlinks' often do nothing for getting your site indexed or raising its authority with the search engines. Often these sites themselves have little authority with the search engines and/or link to damaging websites.
A good tip when selecting a page to place your link is to check its page rank. A page rank 1 or better should lead the search engines to your site with a day or two at the most.