This article is focused on how to make search engines work for you. It describes the steps you need to take to get your site indexed, and includes a few link-building methods to get you started.
Many new site owners have the same issue and it’s often simply a problem of not knowing how search engines work. The most likely culprit—the search engine doesn’t know your site exists yet. Here's how to change that.
Find out if your site is already indexed
Often, a search engine will have indexed your site and you won't even know it; therefore it's good practice to see where your site is indexed before you bother with anything else.
Also, keep in mind this has nothing to do with keyword searches, right now you just need to know if you are indexed.
Here's how to check:
On MSN or Google Search: Type site:
Tip You can keep tabs on your indexing automatically at Google by using Google Alerts.
On Yahoo! Web Search: Type domain:
Be sure you enter the information in the format shown above for each search engine., if you aren't sure just click on the sample links and look in the search box to see exactly how it's done.
The important thing to note here is the number of results that each returns; these are shown in the red boxes above. If no results come back for your site, or you get a message saying no results were found, then your site isn't listed on that engine. So, how do we change that? You can get your site name out there in two steps. First, submit your site name to the search engines directly. Second, do what you can to get links built from other recognized sites to your site.
1. Submit your site name directly to the major search engines
Once you’ve determined that your site isn't listed on a search engine, you’ll want to submit it top that engine directly .. The good news is that this part is easy; all you have to do is go to their submission pages and follow the instructions.
Here are the direct links:
MSN Search
Yahoo! Search (log in is required, but it's free)
Google Search
You should only need to submit your site to each engine once.
Note Getting added to an index can take anywhere from one day to a month or more; the time needed is pretty much all up to the search engines, unless you are really good at the next step.
2. Build links to your site, business will follow
Now you might ask, ”"Isn’t submitting my site name enough?”
The answer is simply, "No." Submitting will often get you indexed quickly, but without a few incoming links your site may not stay indexed. Links help keep your site indexed for the long term.
This is the hard part, but is most important to the success of your site. Search engines love links, especially links from other established Web sites to yours, also known as backlinks or incoming links.
Search engines love links because they indicate to the search engine that your site is valuable to someone else (they have linked to you, after all); search engines see this as a sign of quality. In general, the more links you get to your site, the higher quality it appears to the search engines and the higher the quality, the more they want your site in their index.
To get some starter links try these methods:
Talk to everyone you know with a site. Ask friends, family, suppliers, business associations, sometimes even competitors to link to your site from theirs. It’s best if the site with the links is related to yours, but any link helps. You might even consider asking in the Microsoft Office Live Community. To find out more about using links to highlight your site and raise its ranking in list of returned links, the article 10 steps to getting links to your site is a great primer.
Submit to topical directories. Find directories that relate to the topic of your site or your location and submit your site to the appropriate category. Note that some directories do carry a small fee for listings. Chambers of commerce, for example, often have a page of links to local businesses.
Following up
Once you have submitted your site name and built some links to your site, you will need to follow up and see how it’s working for you.
To do that, you can check each engine as shown earlier to see if you are getting indexed. After you submit your site name, you might check every two weeks or so. If after four to six weeks you are still not listed, you may want to resubmit to the search engines and try building some more links. You should also check to see that those who said they would add links to your site have actually added them, sometimes people forget!
These are just the first steps to getting indexed in the search engines. Once your site is in (and staying in) the returns list, you can move on to improving your rankings, and develop a more in-depth link building plan to really get your traffic flowing.
var olpagename="Member center, Resource center, Introducing your site to the search engines";
No comments:
Post a Comment