If you have been contemplating getting your website on search engines, it is not as hard as you might think. In this post I will give you some easy steps to help you out, as well as explain the difference between optimizing for the search engines and getting indexed by them.

Here is what you can expect to learn:

• Getting Your Website Indexed On Search Engines
• Optimizing Your Website For The Search Engines
• Which Search Engines Should You Be Getting On

Getting Your Website Indexed On Search Engines

Actually getting your website indexed into the search engines is no longer as painful as it once was. Where you may have had to manually submit your website URL to the search engines in the past, now you can follow a couple of easy guidelines and get index almost immediately.

Getting your website indexed in the search engines is the first step to ranking highly for any keywords that you are targeting with your search engine optimization. Before you can begin rising in the organic search results, the search engines need to know your website even exists.

There are many different ways to get your website indexed at this point, but here are some of my favorites.

Linking to your website or page on Twitter. Over the past year or so Google has started watching Twitter like a hawk. Everything that goes on inside of Twitter is being sucked up by Google as the newest, freshest online material. Since Google, and other search engines, are all about serving up the freshest most relevant content, making a simple post to Twitter with your link can get you index immediately. Just a side note, the amount of followers you have does not matter in order for your site to get indexed when linked through Twitter.

Another easy way to get index quickly is by submitting your website to any number of social bookmarking sites.  Let’s take Digg.com for example.  Digg.com allows you to submit a link to your website along with a short blurb about that page. Not only to people actually use Digg to find new websites and information, the search engines know it is a great place to find new content.  With the search engines watching and waiting for this new content, submitting your site there is an easy way for you to let them know that your new page is available.

Lastly is to manually submit your website to the search engines. This is not something I do very often anymore, but I have seen it help in the past. Using Goggle as the example, you can “Add your URL to Google” by following this link http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl.

Note that they say “We do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear”. This message is the reason that I typically stick with those first two options when trying to get my website on search engines.

If you are the kind of person that likes to overkill, then go with all three.

Also note there many other ways of getting your website on search engines, these are just the ones I feel are easiest.

Optimizing Your Website For The Search Engines

Getting your website on search engines is great, but if you are not optimizing your page you may be missing out on lots of traffic. Wikipedia says that search engine optimization(SEO) is “the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.”

Millions of people are searching for specific terms over and over again every day. There are ways to find out what exact phrases they are searching for, which you can then take and optimize your site with. For instance, this article is designed to rank highly for the keyword phrase “Getting Your Website on Search Engines“. You may have found this page because of those efforts.

When optimizing your website there are a few fundamental things you can do which will give you a great foundation and increase the likelihood that your website shows up for that keyword phrase. If you would like to learn more about the basics of check out our Search Engine Optimization 101 series.

Which Search Engines Should You Be Getting On

There are hundreds, probably even thousands of search engines at this point. Trying to make sure you are showing up on all of them could be a real big headache, so I am going to let you in on a little secret. All search engines want to be Google.

That being said, I have found that if you are ranking highly for something in Google, you are almost guaranteed to be ranking highly on sites like Bing and Yahoo. Instead of wasting your time worrying about the other search engines, you can probably just focus your energy getting your website on Google, and let the others take care of themselves.

I hope this post helps you in your quest for getting your website on search engines. Remember that search engine optimization is just that, optimization, it is not a guaranteed thing. The more steps that you take to optimize, the better your chances will be. The sooner you get indexed by the search engines, the sooner you will start seeing results.

Thank you for reading, let us know if you have any questions.

Tagged as: Getting Your Website on Search Engines