So, you have your new website that you have spent months perfecting and have released to the public, only to find that you are not appearing in the search engines. Waiting for the search engines to come and play can be frustrating, but luckily it is far quicker than it was a few years ago, where you had to wait months just to see your site ranking for its own name!
To get your site into the search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing requires them to index you, which they do by releasing “bots” that come along and view your site and then send it back to head quarters. Once the main system has processed the findings you should then see your website appearing in the search results of the three big engines, but this can take time.
Below, we look at our top tips when it comes to achieving indexing for your newly released website.
Webmaster Tools – All of the three big search engines, Google, Yahoo and Bing have their own webmaster panel, which means that you can let them know about your site, submit a sitemap and then keep an eye on your results and any issues really easily. It only takes a few minutes to verify your site with a range of different options available for you to be able to do this.
Use A Google Product – By using a Google product you are in affect sending their spiders along albeit it in a different way to normal, but we have seen roughly the same result. Make sure you use Google Analytics on your sites as we have had sites indexed just through doing this and it is also well worth running a small cost per click campaign to help things along as well.
On Site Optimisation – The better optimised your site is, the more chance of the engines liking what they see when they come to play and actually indexing you correctly and rewardingly. It is pretty easy to get the spider bots to your site, the hard job is making sure the site is good enough to allow them to crawl the data and then do something with it, with good on site optimisation a must to make sure this process succeeds.
Press Releases And Article Submissions – Write some press releases and articles and get them submitted across the Internet. You can use free and paid press release websites to achieve links back, with press release sites like Official Wire and directory sites like EzineArticles really well respected by the search engines. Every time you release a press release or article you will get a link back if you do things correctly and especially with articles once others republish them if they are of quality.
High Page Rank Link Backs – Try to get some high page rank links when your site goes live, achievable if you own other indexed sites or are owed a few favours by friends with nicely indexed sites. The spider bots follow links from respected sites to others and that’s how they usually find your site, so the more respected the site, in theory, the quicker the bots should come and visit you.
Social Media – A few years ago using Facebook and Twitter to try and help with getting your site indexed would not have been much use, mainly because their pages were not easily indexed for various reasons. Now that Facebook has changed privacy settings and tweets from Twitter now form part of the search results, the search engines are now able to see the sites and follow them through to your site, helping to get your website noticed by the engines.
If you have done all of these things and still find you have not been indexed, check your robots.txt file to make sure you are not blocking the engines.
