Get Your Site Indexed in 4 Easy Steps

When I built my first website I was uber excited and sat back waiting for all those visitors to come flooding through.

Of course, the reality hit me pretty quickly, which is when I realized I had absolutely no idea how I could get people to notice me online. Luckily things are different now!

Here are a few simple steps you can take to speed up the time it takes to list your new site:

1. Fill out your META data fields properly - and use all of them, filled out uniquely for each page on your website. I've referred to this many times before, but the message bears repeating: the META tags are there to let the search engines know what your site is about, how to find it and how often they should visit it.

Different search engines use different META tags in different ways, and those ways will change over time. So fill them all out.

If you're not sure how to do that use this tool here http://www.htmlbasix.com/meta.shtml and copy the code they give you onto your page between your HEAD tags

2. Create a site map of your site. This is another aid for the search engines and will enable them to crawl and index your site more thoroughly.

If you've not created a site map before build one here. http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/. Again, follow their instructions and upload the file they create for you to your site.

3. Google's Webmaster tools is a great service - and it's free. So open a free Google account, set up Webmaster Toots and start using it. Webmaster Tools will ask you to verify your site by uploading a file containing some code they give you.

Be sure to click the 'submit sitemap' button on the Sitemap page after you've uploaded the file and verified your site.

Once they've verified your site they'll continually analyse it and highlight warnings or problems they find that may be making it difficult for the Google bot to crawl it. They'll also provide you with statistics on when they crawled your site and last downloaded your sitemap.

Through Webmaster Tools you'll also get access to Google's Webmaster Guidelines. This is a great set of guidelines for setting up your site properly and effectively.

Using Google's Webmaster Tools is a great way to make sure your site is clearly visible to Google and to find and correct any problems that may be hindering the search engine robots.

4) Submit your site to Google. Actually - you don't need to submit it if you've taken the steps above. Taking these steps will ensure that the Google bot finds and crawls your site properly and regularly.

If you want to check whether your site has been listed just type this command into Google: site:www.yoursite.com. That search term will return a list of the pages on your site that Google has indexed.

If your website hasn't been listed (i.e. if there are no results from that search) you can submit your site manually here: http://www.google.com/addurl.html.

If you follow these steps with your next site it will be listed earlier and showing up in the search results more quickly.