As web designers we often get the request from customers to ‘link their site to the search engines’. Presumably this means that they actually want their website to appear on the first page of Google when you search for whatever products they are offering or even just for their website name.
It is quite difficult to explain to customers that it is not just a case of ‘linking the site to the search engines’ to get to the first page. In fact, what most people do not realize is that it is difficult enough to just get the search engines to KNOW about your site in the first place!
Let’s take a look at how the whole process works and how to get your site indexed quickly at least - which is really the first step in a long and laborious process!
When a new site gets created it is a bit like setting up shop in the middle of the desert - no-one is going to know about that shop, least of all the search engines, if you don’t do something about it!
The first step in getting known to the search engines is to get your site indexed. This basically means that the search engines spiders need to visit your website and read the contents and carry those contents back to the Google database where they store all the information about all the websites in the world. This is a simplistic explanation but it will suffice to make the basic concepts clear.
Only once your website is indexed can you even think of starting to rank well - meaning that Google thinks enough about the content and reputation of your website that it will start to present your site on the first page of Google when people look for information pertaining to what you are offering.
This first step, to get your site indexed, is often quite a problem. This is because few people realize that your website in the desert needs at least one road to it for the search engines to find it, meaning that you need to either inform the search engines directly about your site, or inform them indirectly about your site.
Informing them directly is normally taken to mean that you can make use of the facilities offered by the main search engines to submit your site. You can do that, but experience has shown that this is often not the most effective way to get your site indexed. There are better ways of directly informing them, especially Google, about your site.
Indirectly there are also two ways: Firstly, you can submit your site to a high profile directory that you know will accept your site relatively quickly, or you can ask an associate, friend, supplier or client to put a link to your site on their website. This means that you are now building a little road to your isolated website. Soon the search engine spiders will find your website and index it.
The problem with this approach is really that it works but it takes a very long time for the whole site to be indexed.
The best approach is to take the route of directly submitting to the search engines but NOT through the submit functionality offered by them. The best approach is to create a sitemap of your site in the standard format. This format has been agreed upon as the standard format to submit the information about your site to all the major search engines. This means that you can now create one sitemap for your site and it will be read by all the major search engines.
After you have created your sitemap, the second step is to create a Google Webmaster account and submit it to Google through using your webmaster account. There are multiple other advantages in setting up a webmaster account as well, but by far the biggest is that it provides you with the means of getting your site indexed in Google quickly and efficiently. All the pages of your site should be indexed within a couple of days and sometimes within a couple of hours.
Christine Anderssen is the owner of Tailormade4you, a web design and hosting company specializing in building cost effective websites for small business owners in South Africa.