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. If your website has not yet been picked up by search engines, you’re obviously missing out on lots of juicy traffic. In this article, I will show you the fastest way to get indexed for free and get those visitors rolling in!
The Wrong Approach
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. You can find a link somewhere that says something along the lines of “Register your site with Google”. You can then enter your website’s URL and submit it to be indexed or “crawled” by the search engine in question.
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. After manual submission, it can take days or even weeks before your website actually gets indexed and what’s the point in having your site submitted to hundreds of search engines no one uses?
The Right Approach
Here’s how to get your site indexed super-fast, in a nutshell: Make sure that there are links on popular sites, pointing to your website.
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 sends it’s “bot” to those sites every few hours or even more frequently to make sure they have all the new content listed in their search results. Now, if a link to your website appears on such a highly popular site, the Google bot will see that link, follow it and find your site. And since it was linked to from an important website, your website will get indexed soon thereafter.
Ok, great, but how do you do this?
Signatures in Forums
Register with a forum (or use one you’re all registered with), write some posts and add a link to your site in the sig-line. Just do yourself and everyone else a favour by only posting interesting and relevant stuff and not doing it in a spammy way.
Social Bookmarking
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.You can place a link to your site in your “bio box”, “about me” section or signature of the article. Submit the article to ezinearticles, articlesbase or goarticles and it’s sure to get picked up by the search engines quickly.
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.
More on this subject: Article spinning software reviewed. — What is Article Spinning? (Video)
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Thanks for the tips. I’ve just started putting up a site today and will follow what you’ve said to see if I can get it indexed within the next 48 hours. I used to manually submit and even use those quick submit to 10o different site things but I can now see that it was a total waste of time.