July 29, 2008

Do Search Engines Know Yous Site? - Part 2

Your site hasn't been submitted to Search Engines yet.

Note! This problem is quite uncommon, and it can only be a reason for a): getting no results for the website at all.

Try to remember: did you submit your site to Search Engines, or maybe someone did that for you? Or, did you get a link to your site from some rather respected web page?
If your answer to both questions is "no", you'll need to correct the mistake. But it's simple and I guess it won't take more than 5 minutes to do. Search Engines' robots will then crawl your website the next time they're out and about, and you'll become visible.

1) Submit your site to Search Engines

Yes, let's send each Search Engine's spider a personal invitation to visit your site.

Just go to the Search Engine that's important to you, and type in "add URL to name_of_the_search_engine", then follow the link you see, enter the necessary data and thus submit your website to this Search Engine.

Note! Search Engines don't expect you to submit all your webpages (just think of some forums that have a few thousand pages — the owner would go crazy submitting them!). All you have to do is submit your homepage.

Want an example? Here we go with Yahoo!.

I go to http://www.yahoo.com, type in add URL to Yahoo, follow the necessary link ( http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html ) in the results page, then choose to submit my website for free and get to the page where I enter my website's URL.

Click Submit URL — and that's it.

Submit your site to all Search Engines that you think are important, and the crawler will come to your site to look at it. What Search Engines are a must for you? First of all, these are: Google.com, Yahoo.com and MSN.com. For your convenience, here're the pages from which you start in these three:


If you expect clients to come from, say, Belgium or Germany, it's good to submit to their regional versions like Yahoo.de or Google.be. Also, if there's a special local Search Engine in your country, like Yandex in Russia, or Seznam in Czech Republic, it's also important to you.

Note! It won't take much of your time to submit to search engines, but it may take quite a long time till the crawler visits your site. In my practice, it took up to 6 weeks. And, it also depends on the Search Engine.

2) Put a FAT link to your website

Quite logically: if the Google spider loves some web page and visits it quite often, and that page has a link to your site, then this Google crawler will be happy to follow the link and look at your site, too. Same thing about other Search Engines.

So here's what I'm driving at: try to get a link from some respected web page with a good Page Rank (preferably 4 and above).

Submit your website to search engines, or put a good link to your site, or do both.