Getting Your Site Indexed
So your pages are ready, but you still have the indexing problem. Your pages are, to put in bluntly, just not in the search engine! How do you fix that problem?
For Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project, you have to go to those sites and register directly, but before doing that. With Google, Yahoo! Web Search, MSN Live Search, and Ask.com, the process
is a little more time consuming and complicated. The best way to get into the search engines is to have them find the pages by following links pointing to the site. In some cases, you can ask or pay the search engines to come to your site and pick up your pages, but you face two main problems with this:
· If you ask search engines to index your site, they probably won’t do it. And if they do come and index your site, it may take weeks or months. Asking them to come to your site is unreliable.
· If you pay search engines to index your site, you have to pay for every URL you submit. The problem with paying, of course, is that you have to pay.
If you want to submit your site to the search engines for indexing, read Chapter 11, where I provide all the details. So how do you get indexed? The good news is that you can often get indexed by some of the search engines very quickly. I’m not talking about a full-blown link campaign here, with all the advantages. You simply want to get search engines — particularly
Yahoo!
MSN
Live Search
Bing
Ask.com
to pick up the site and index it. Find another Web site to link to your site, right away. Call several friends, colleagues, and relatives who own or control a Web site, and ask them to link to your site. Of course, you want sites that are already indexed by search engines. The searchbots have to follow the links to your site.
When you ask friends, colleagues, and relatives to link to you, specify what you want the links to say. No click here or company name links for you. You want to place keywords into the link text. Something like Visit this site for all your rodent racing needs - mice, rats, stoats, gerbils, and all other kinds of rodent racing. Keywords in links are a powerful way to tell a search engine what your site is about.
After the sites have links pointing to yours, it can take from a few days to a few weeks to get into the search engines.
With Google, if you place the links right before Googlebot indexes one of the sites, you may be in the index in a few days. I once placed some pages on a client’s Web site on a Tuesday and
found them in Google (ranked near the top) on Friday. But Google can also take several weeks to index a site. The best way to increase your chances of getting into search engines quickly is to get as many links as you can on as many sites as possible.
You should also create an XML sitemap, submit that to Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Live Search, and add a line in your robots.txt file that points to the sitemap so that search systems — such as Ask.com — that don’t provide a way for you to submit the sitemap can still find it.
