Feb 05 2008
Getting Your Site Indexed In the Search Engines
I see many webmasters panic when their site is not indexed in Google and the other search engines right away. Indexing is simply having your site placed in the search engine results. This is not uncommon and nothing to panic over. It takes a little bit of work to get your site indexed sometimes.
If you have a blog, either self hosted Word Press or a free hosted Blogger or Word Press blog, they seem to already set up for good SEO and they seem to index quickly. Part of this is they are set up to automatically ping other sites letting them know that you have posted. For example, this blog was indexed with in a few minutes of the first post that I posted.
Sometimes blogs do not get indexed quickly and many regular PHP and HTML sites do not. The next step would be to do something to get your site known to the search engines. Yahoo and Google both allow you to submit your site URL to them directly. You can also submit a site map to them. A site map is simply put, a snapshot of your website pages. This can be done quickly and easily by searching for a simple site map generator. There are many good ones. Once the site map is generated, you down load it to your computer and upload it to your server. Once you do this, you go to Google and/or Yahoo and follow the instructions to submitting the site map. Both do require you to have a free account with them.
Another way to get your site indexed quickly is to add a link on a popular or high PR site. This can be as simple as placing a link on a forum you use. You could also get a link on a related blog that is popular. The more often the site you add your link to updates, the better chance that your site will be seen by the search engines quicker.
Other ways to is to add your site to popular book marking or social sites. For example, I use Stumble Upon and I try to Stumble any article of interest. This helps get you traffic and it also gets your site out there to be seen by the search engine bots. There are many other sites that you can submit your site to similar to Stumble Upon.
The key to getting a site indexed is doing good Search Engine Optimization. You want to make your site as friendly and inviting as possible to the search engines so that their bots will come and visit. It takes a little work and the more work you do to tweak your site and promote your site, the quicker you will be indexed.
The result of any good project is you get out of it what you are willing to put into it.
