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Step 5 - Getting Listed On Search Engines
In the latest survey of the most popular search engines Google, Yahoo!, MSN and ASK controlled over 90% of the search referrals in the United States and close to that figure around the world. Google's dominance is even more impressive in European countries such as the UK and Germany where Google's search market share is nearly 75%.
How do websites get listed?
The top three search engines have automated the retrieval of web content by following hyperlinks from site to site. They are called "crawlers", or sometimes referred to as "spiders", "bots" or "agents". T
The search engine job is to index fresh updated content and links. Your website will get included in their database if the spiders have discovered a link pointing to your new domain somewhere on the web.
Do I have to re-submit a new or changed web page to get re-indexed?
The crawler based search engines automatically re-index websites daily, weekly or monthly depending on the website's popularity. The depth of the indexing varies each time the search engines visit your website.
When you submit your website to Google, Yahoo!, or MSN, your website is automatically included in all the international versions of their search engines.
The traditional search engine submission process
Although the traditional method of submitting your website to a search engine in order to get listed is still viable, there are much faster methods to get your site indexed. The traditional registration method is known as search engine submission and it's the process of directly notifying the search engines about your new website by visiting them and submitting your URL through their web forms.
In order to submit your website, you are required to enter your home page URL only, and sometimes a brief description of your website. One very important thing to note is you never have to submit individual pages of your site to crawler based search engines.
Manual or automatic submission?
There are two ways you can submit your site to the search engines using the manual method outlined above or using some type of automated software tool or online service.
The benefit of using a search engine submission service is that it will save time. If you only want to submit one website to the Google, Yahoo! and MSN you may be able to accomplish the task in less than an a few minutes. But if you want to submit multiple websites to dozens of international search engines the time required would be greatly increased.
How can we speed up the indexing process?
The average waiting period for a new website to get indexed by the major search engines can vary from a few days to a month or more. The most effective solution to getting your website indexed faster is to gain a few links from sites that have already been indexed by Google, Yahoo! or MSN.
You may be able to reduce the waiting period for indexation from a few weeks to as little as 48 hours by following the simple steps below:
Get your web site listed in a local trade organization's online directory or chamber of commerce website.
Exchange links with other related websites, look for high Google PageRank link partners.
Get listed in DMOZ, Yahoo! and other smaller, but high quality directories.
Create a useful blog on topics related to your website, and ask other websites to link to your blog.
Submit your blog's RSS feed to the top search engines. Google, Yahoo! and MSN use blog feeds to power their blog search engines and when you submit your blog's RSS feed URL, your site also gets indexed right away.
Participate in popular forums or community discussions and post your website URL as part of your signature.
Create a press release and submit it to an online press release distribution service such as prweb.com
Submit your site using Delicious.com or Stumbleupon.com. Both of these social bookmarking and discovery sites are an excellent way to get links pointing to your site.
Submit your site using the Google Site Map will ensure a quick indexing process by Google of all your important web pages.
Finding cached copies of web pages
A cached copy of the web page is the search engine's view of a page at a specific point in time in the past. Each cached web pages is time stamped and stored for retrieval, but only the text portion of the page is being saved by the search engines. All the images and other embedded object are stripped out prior to archiving.
An often neglected topic pertaining to search engine indexing is how much content search engine spiders actually index. The search engine crawlers have preset limits on the volume of text they are able to index per page. This is important, because going over the page size limit could mean your pages may only be partially searchable.
Each search engine has its own specific page size limits. Familiarizing yourself with these limits can minimize future indexing and ranking problems. If a web page is too large, the search engines may not index the entire page. Although the search engines don't publish exact limits of their spiders' technical configuration, in many instances we can draw definite conclusions about page size limitations.
In the previous section we have discussed how new websites get indexed and how the submission process works. If we want our websites to rank well, we have to make sure all the web pages contained within our website get crawled as frequently as possible.
Finding out how many web pages the search engines have indexed is important for two reasons:
Web pages that are not indexed by the search engines can never achieve any ranking. In order to determine a web page's relevance in response to a query, the search engines must have a record of that page in their database including the complete page content.
The number of web pages indexed can influence a website's overall ranking score. Larger websites tend to outrank 2-3 page mini websites, providing all other external ranking factors are equal.
There are very simple ways to check if your website has already been indexed. Go to a search engine, and simply enter the domain name of your website or some unique text that can be found on your web page only. This can be your business name or a product name which is unique to your website.
Finding out if your home page is indexed is very important, but what about all the other pages on your site? Google, Yahoo!, and MSN provide search commands for finding all the pages indexed on a specific domain. These search options are accessible on most engines by clicking on the advanced search option link next to the search box.
The above method for checking indexed pages is just one of many ways we can find out how many pages got indexed by the search engine crawlers. There are some excellent free online tools available to check the number of indexed pages on multiple search engines simultaneously.
Conclusion
The crawler based search engines make the web marketers job easy. Initially, you have to let the search engines know your site is online by giving them a link to follow or submit your home page directly. Without any additional work on your part, your site will be visited over and over again by the search engine robots to find any new pages or updated content.
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