Built a new website recently? In that case, one of the crucial first steps is getting it indexed by Google and other search engines as soon as possible. As long as your site isn’t indexed (i.e. listed) on search engines, it will be almost impossible for new users to find your website. This post outlines a quick and simple method for ensuring that every new site you create gets indexed and listed very quickly.
How Not to Do It
First, let’s take a quick look at what not to do, in order to get your site listed. Every search engine has some option for manual site submission. There’s usually a link hidden away somewhere that reads something like “Register your site with Google/Yahoo/whatever”. This option lets you enter your website’s address and basically politely ask the search provider to come by and have a look at it.
Sometimes you’ll also see services offering to “Submit your site to 200 top search engines internationally!” or something like that.
Avoid both of these things. Manually submitting your site to a search engine is a waste of time and using a service to have it done is a waste of money. Manual submission can get your site indexed, but it can take weeks for it to happen and the services are really just relying on you knowing nothing at all about SEO.
Here’s What to Do Instead
Ok, enough ranting, here’s what you should do instead, to get your site listed within a few hours: Place backlinks to your site on highly popular sites.
Why is this a good thing to do? The more popular and frequently updated a site is, the more often it gets visited by search engine spiders. Google crawls such sites on a daily or even hourly basis, adding new content and sites to the index. The thing is, when Google crawls the site and there’s a link on there, pointing to your website, the “bot” will follow that link and discover it. And since it was linked to from an important website, your website will get indexed soon thereafter.
The Nuts and Bolts of How to Do This
Forum Signatures
Sign up to a forum with a topic relevant to your website, make a few posts and add a link to your new site in the signature. Just do yourself and everyone else a favour by only posting interesting and relevant stuff and not doing it in a spammy way.
Bookmark Submission
Bookmark your site on delicious, mixx, folkd or any of the other few hundred bookmarking sites out there. The links on bookmarking sites get posted instantly and search engine bots are usually not far away.
Use Article Directories
Write an article and submit it to an article directory.Every article directory let’s you place a few links in your “resource box” at the end of the article. You can even take the same article you wrote and submit it to more than one directory.
Following any or all of these tips, your new site will be listed on Google within a few hours. A word of caution: Don’t abuse these options. Don’t create a spammy sales-site and submit each and every page to Digg. Don’t write a crappy, “empty” article and submit it to article directories. Don’t annoy people on the forums by posting irrelevant comments and having an obnoxious collection of links in your signature.
These things will not only hurt your reputation and prevent people from clicking your links, they will most probably also get you banned from the respective sites and with that, you’ll lose those backlinks as well.
So, just remember: Even if your main goal is to get the attention of search engines, never forget the actual humans involved in the process as well.
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