Submit your website to the 3 major Search Engines…

When you have you NEW website finish and are ready to submit to the 3 major search engines (Google, Live Search and Yahoo), just do the following steps:

Google: go to the Google Add URL page, enter you web address and the “squiggly letter” shown in box then click on Add URL. Google will usually find your website in less than 7 days, sometimes sooner at that time with the help of a Sitemap it will start to index your web site pages.

LIVE Search: go to the Submit URL page, enter the characters from the picture displayed and type your homepage URL, then click on Submit URL

Yahoo: go to the Submit Your Site page on Yahoo Site Explorer, enter the webpage address and click on Submit URL

Basically thats it, pretty simple. Most of the organic search results that you will be getting to your site will be coming from the 3 major search engines. There are other search engines that you can submit to, we will cover that in the next post.

Search engines and Sitemap

You see the advertisements all over the internet, “Get your website listed on Google within 7 days, only $$$”. The fact is you don’t have to pay anyone to get listed on the Google, MSN (Live), and Yahoo. Most of the times the search engines spider will find you. But you have to be ready by having a completed website, with all links working, content based of what the website is about and including specific keywords you want to target. You can help the search engines crawl and understand better you websites internal structure by including a Sitemap.

A Sitemap is a list of the pages on your website. By including one on your server you are letting the search engines know all the pages you have on your website, when the pages were modified and how often they change. You want to include two types of Sitemap, a Sitemap.xml and Sitemap.html.

A Sitemap.xml is the what the search engines will look at behind the scene. You can create a site map by going to XML-sitemaps.com input your website address and on the following page you will have your Sitemap.xml ready, download it…then uploaded to your web server. You also have the option to download a Sitemap.html, this is what the end user (human) will use to find pages on your website.

The Story of a Search Engine

A Search Engine is a program that searches for documents based on a specific keyword requested. When a search engine finds a new website it indexes the pages by crawling each of the pages that are linked to each other, its make a copy of it and stores it in its system. Unlike a web directory which are maintained by humans, search engines work with an algorithm or sequence of instructions to return the most relevant result to the user.

Search engines look at website as if they were books. If someone is searching for the keyword “weight loss”, the search engine will look into which website is relevant to that word, how many times that word is used on the site, how many other websites link to it (authority), anchor text linking, and of course the web address itself will have an impact on it.

In the beginning…

In the beginning…You had an idea for a website, You design your website, you choose a web hosting service, You uploaded the files, You included keywords that related to your website…and the search engines found you. Basic right?

Times have changed. With search engines working on bringing the most relevant search results back to the user, it has become difficult to get traffic or be seen in front of other millions of websites. The old saying, “If you build it, they will come”, does not apply anymore. The new saying is, “If you build it, market it, promote it, optimize it, THEN they will come”.