Update: This post was originally published in 2012, and is being re-published with updated information on 5th July 2015.
Having a website today is an essential part of an online presence, and it’s important that your target customers can find your website by your brand name in search engines.
Many businesses have already added blogs to their websites for faster indexing and for more exposure from search engines and social media.
In this article, I’m going to share information which will help you to make your site visible to search engines in no time.
Recently I worked on two websites – one for my client and one for myself. The challenge with both was to index a website in Google within 24 hours. This is not a simple task, but neither is it an overwhelming one if you pay attention to what I am about to teach you here. A proper strategy will help you to put your website into search engines within 24 hours – and maybe only in a couple of hours!
Let’s get started:
You can try the following instructions with any new domain you have purchased, or with any site which you created in the past but which is not getting traffic from search engines.
The first step is to determine whether or not your site is indexed in Google or any other search engines. Go to Google.com and type site:domain.com (Replace “domain.com” with your actual domain name, (example: shoutmeloud.com), and check to see whether the site is indexed or not.
If there are no results, it’s time to follow the steps below and get your site into Google. Here is a screenshot for my query:
What is indexing of a website?
Many of you may not be aware of the meaning of the term indexing. Indexing in SEO refers to search engines keeping a record of your web pages. When working on indexing of our site, we should target all major search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc).
Usually when a search engine bot comes onto your site, it starts crawling and, based on “index” and “noindex” meta tags, it adds pages with index tags in that search engine. This is how you control what pages from your website should be found in the various search engines. You can watch the video below from 5:27 to learn more about how search engines work:
Here is a synopsis of the strategy I used to put both my client’s website and mine into the search engines within 24 hours.
Apart from onpage SEO optimization like meta tags, meta keywords, meta descriptions and on-site SEO (noindex, nofollow), I used robots.txt to put the websites into search engines in just a few hours. Robots.txt refers to a standard used by websites to communicate with web crawlers and other web robots.
Before you try to index a new website, make sure you have your content prepared, because you don’t want Google bots to come and crawl your empty homepage!
Make sure you do all of the basic onsite SEO work mentioned above first, and then work on the following steps to get your site indexed fast.
Guide to Indexing a Website in Google Within a Few Hours:
This strategy should work with all websites, as we will be using external sites to send crawlers to our site. The results also depend on how fast Google updates the newly indexed pages.
Note that if you are doing this work for a client, you may wish to research the index status in all countries to check for data replication delays.
Submission to blog networks :
We talk about blog directories and blog networks as though they were things of the past, but in fact even today networks and directories work. As in the past, however, you should not submit your blog to every blog network or directory. Instead, submit your blog only to selected blog networks and directories, making sure to avoid link exchange directories!
To begin:
Blogcatalog:
This is one of my favorites because this blog network drives lots of traffic and always links back to my blog.
Sitemap submission :
A sitemap is created to help search engine crawlers to effectively crawl your blog, so make sure you have created a sitemap for your site or your client’s site.
Next, submit the sitemap to Google/ Bing/ Yahoo / Ask and other popular search engines.
Commenting dofollow/Comment Luv:
Since one of the sites in my example was related to a paid job and it had to be completed within a given time-frame, I added almost 30+ comments for both sites on the CommentLuv blog.
I did not check for dofollow or nofollow attributes, but I did comment on popular, high traffic blogs. This confirmed that search engine bots will follow the comment links and will land on my blog, and that is exactly what happened.
Popular website stats program :
Some of you may not be aware of websites which keep stats of domains or show the price and value of any domain. This is a nice way to get your site indexed, however submitting to multiple stat sites is not easy, so we want to use free tools like IMT website submitter. With this tool, all you need to do is to add the link and anchor text, and IMT submitter will submit your site to sites like who.is, “website stats” and other such sites.
Social bookmarking submission :
This is another very effective method, though somehow within four hours my website was in the search engines despite the fact that I did not seek social bookmarking submissions. If you wish to do so however, you can start with Google Plus, Stumble Upon, Facebook (public share), and Twitter for faster indexing of your content.
Guest posting:
If your budget is sufficient and you have the necessary time and patience required, prepare 5-10 quality posts and ask your fellow bloggers in your niche for permission to publish your articles on their blogs as a guest author and enjoy the resulting backlinks.
If you are doing this for a client, buy 5-10 quality articles and do the same.
Along with backlinks it will drive some traffic to your blog. Try to guest post on relevant popular, high-ranking pages and on regularly updated websites.
Ping services:
Ping services offer another effective way to notify search engines of your existence. Pingomatic is one such tool which you can use to notify multiple search engines at once, and another you can try is Pingler. Wordpress does have a default feature to ping services, but giving one of these other options a shot can’t hurt.
Here are my results, achieved within four hours:
The screenshot above is for one of my websites. I simply tried indexing that parked domain site for test purposes, so kindly avoid the meta description shown.
For your website, make sure you add a meta description and all of the other important SEO details, as you don’t want search engines to index useless pages of your site.
If you enjoyed reading this, here are two more suggested articles:
I also suggest that you create a profile on Google Plus, and add your website link or share your link publicly. This will also be very helpful, as Google has started following Google Plus links very quickly.
I would love to hear your feedback about this post as well as your thoughts on any other information which might be useful to the topic of indexing websites.
No comments:
Post a Comment