return indexing

i recently have a web site up and am doing some research into SEO. according to google their spiderbot makes it through its full crawl in cycles of about a month, which is the time frame thus suggested your site will be indexed at. it is obvious that many sites get indexed much more regularly, such as a news site. i am wondering what compells faster updates, just ranking? when i put in text searches for things relevant in the news i also often get some dinky sites that i wouldn't expect had much ranking. perhaps the crawler just happened to have indexed those sites but i just didn't see the ones it won't get to till later? is my concept of indexing whack? what's the deal?

Some search engines will check your pages more often to see if they have changed. If your pages, especially your home page, changes often then you will get spidered more regularly. The most often changed sites get spidered every day or two, so if you're a blogger and post all the time, you'll find they always have a fresh page in the 'Cached' version Google stores.

So if you want to get spidered more often, if you update your home page or a page the home page links to every few days or once a week with some new text, Google will realise that it is updated often and start spidering at least that page and the ones it links to more often.