You have a site – What now?

OK, so you’ve gotten yourself a website and are now looking to get started on boosting its search engine ranking. This blog post outlines the first step you should take.

Step 1: Submitting your site to search engines.

Search engines work by running software on their side that scours the internet for links. The software follows these links and reports back what it finds. You can either wait for someone to link to your site, or you can tell the search engines yourself about your new site. This is a no-brainer. Definately tell the  search engine about your site. It will get indexed a lot quicker and you will start appearing in search results within days, insteads of weeks/months.

Every search engine has a different method for receiving site submissions.

For Google, you can submit a site here. But I recommend you sign up to Webmaster Tools too. This site is invaluable for telling you if there are any issues with your site hampering your chances at getting good traffic to your site. You can then fix the issues and optimise your site yourself. It also tells you how people are finding your site, ie what they search for in Google that makes your site show up. Very useful for capitalising on the search terms.

For Yahoo!, use SiteExplorer. This is not as advanced as the Google tools but still useful in submitting your site for indexing. After all, Yahoo! is not the number 1 Search engine, but its still used by a lot of people, so much so, that is would be silly to ignore.

For MSN, it is pretty basic. You simply submit your web address to Live Search and you’re told it will be added to the directory at some stage in the next week or so.

Ask.com – The current 4th largest web search. Submission here is a bit tricky. First you need a sitemap. These will be covered in the next blog.

Once you have one created, visit the below site, substituting the values for the ones relevant to your site.

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.YourSiteName/the URL of your sitemap here.xml

eg

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Cuil is a new web search engine claiming to be the biggest in the world. It certainly has the most number of websites indexed. At the moment, there are 124,426,951,803 web pages indexed! Thats quite a lot!

Anyway, Cuil website submission page.

A lot of other search engines use Open Directory to power their searches. Submit a site to Open Directory.

Also, it may be useful to you, or it may be not, but Chinas largest Search engine is called Baidu. Google only has about 27% penetration in China so its a good idea to submit to Baidu, especially if your web site content is relevant to that continent.

Wrap Up

OK, so now you should be able to submit your website to the top search engines. They’re in the process of doing their job, and all thats left for you to do is do your job and make a decent web page with quality content. Quality, relevant content is the key from here on in.

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