up til now I have only paid for traffic. Now I am trying some seo with a new site. How long does it take the se's to find and index a page if you are doing the normal seo stuff... directories and article submission etc?
If you do it in the middle of an update it sometimes gets indexed in a few hours. If it takes more than a couple days then i would start to worry.
with site command. Example site:www.site.com or on yahoo by this : http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
Don't worry about it, it's just a more complicated rewording of what I said earlier. Just type your URL into the search box of a search engine, and if it shows up in the results, you're indexed
Just to clarify, this only checks Google's datacenters, while Shoe's script checks the four big search engines.