Get Your Website to Show up on the Search Engines

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A website without visitors is like dry land to a fish. Useless! So now that you've built a website, how will somebody outside of your friends and family know about it? They'll Google it, of course! But before that will work, your site needs to be recognized—or indexed—so that it will appear in searches. We'll show you how make that happen.

Steps

Status Check

  1. Check your index status. You can find out if your site's been indexed pretty quickly by doing a couple of simple searches.
    • While your first thought may be "Google it," there are actually 2 primary search engines: Google and Bing. Note that Bing actually comprises Bing, MSN, and Yahoo.
  2. Go to Google.com and search for your URL. If it does not appear, it has not been indexed yet.
  3. Repeat with Bing. It's possible one will show as indexed, and the other not.
    • Searching for your site's content as opposed to its URL could give you misleading results. For example, if you have a site about juggling, you do a search for "juggling" and don't find your site on the first few pages, you might assume it hasn't been indexed. But consider that "juggling" returns nearly 7 million results, and you will see that it's possible you are indexed, just not in the top 50 results. Or even top 5,000!

Get Indexed

  1. Get linked. Search engines use "spiders" to crawl around the web on existing links, looking for new ones. There are several ways to get a spider to weave a web to your site.
    • If you already have a blog or another website that is indexed, put a link to your new website, and don't bury it. Make it big and bold. You want people to see it, to click it, and to visit your site!
    • Ask somebody with an indexed website to link to your website. It could be as simple as an embedded reference, or an ad for your product. The more people linked to your website, the better, so don't be shy if you want to self-promote.
    • Submit your website to popular social bookmarking sites like Digg and Stumbleupon.
    • Submit your website to the Open Directory Project (ODP). (See how Open Directory Project shows in blue? That's the link back to dmoz.org, the ODP site). ODP is a multilingual open content directory of links that is reviewed and maintained by volunteer editors.
    • Include a link to your new site on your Facebook page and Twitter profile. In fact, put a link on every website you can. This will not only ensure you get indexed quickly, it will help you raise your search rank as well, through what's called Search Engine Optimization.

Video

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