Hints and tips to help get your new website indexed in Google.
Launching a new website can prove difficult. At first, your website is completely unknown, you have no inbound links, and you can’t be found in the search engines. So what do you do? Williams&Crosby have launched countless websites over the years and have experimented with many different methods of quickly getting websites indexed.
Here are some of our top tips to get your new website indexed in Google…
Submit your website URL to Google
This really has to be your first priority. Google can’t index your website if it doesn’t know about it, so submitting your homepage URL is definitely the best place to start. Just make sure you only add one URL per domain (normally your homepage) otherwise it might be considered spam. Google’s crawlers will find all the other pages in your website by following internal links.
Here’s the link to submit your URL to Google:
www.google.com/addurl
Yahoo’s ‘Add URL’ function:
search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
And Microsoft Live:
search.live.com/docs/submit.aspx
Add an XML sitemap
It can take quite some time for Google’s crawlers to index all the pages in a new website just by following links. The larger the website, the more time it can take. Adding an XML sitemap really solves this problem because it tells Google about all your pages ahead of time. If you have a large website with many pages then an XML sitemap will help indexing enormously. Easily create one automatically with an XML sitemap generator tool. The XML sitemap standard is supported by Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft so the same sitemap can be used for all three search engines.
Register with Google Webmaster Tools
Once you have created your sitemap file you have to submit it to each search engine. To add a sitemap to Google you must first register your website with Google Webmaster Tools. This website is well worth the effort, it’s completely free plus it’s loaded with invaluable information about your website ranking and indexing in Google. You’ll also find many useful reports including keyword rankings and health checks.
Create a Facebook page for your business
Another interesting thing we’ve noticed lately has to do with social websites. If you create a business page on Facebook and add some interesting content, your page tends to get picked up by Google very quickly.
Submit an article to Digg
If you submit an article to Digg or Reddit or one of the many other large social news websites, your URL tends to get picked up by Google very quickly. Typically a Digg article will appear in Google’s index after only a day or two. This is great news if you want new pages on your website to be indexed very quickly.
The down side to social news submission (if you can call it a down side) is the URL only stays in Google’s index for a few days to a week before it drops out again. After this happens it seems to be crawled as per normal, eventually appearing in the index for good after a more natural timeframe. The only exception to this rule is when an article becomes extremely popular and rises to the front page of the news website – these tend to stay in the index and not drop out at all.
Social news websites are a great way to get new websites indexed. If your site has lots of interesting content you could even find yourself on the front page so it’s well worth giving them a try.
Get listed on Google Maps
Google Places (Maps) offers businesses the opportunity to rank highly on Google local results without the cost of AdWords or an advanced search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign. The best thing about adding your site to Google Places is the fact that it is absolutely FREE!
You can sign up here, add your business (if it’s already listed you can claim it). Enter your company details, including your address, telephone, description, opening hours, payment terms and a few other things.
