Getting your site indexed by the search engines

It takes time for new sites to be crawled and indexed by search engines, and before people will be able to find your site using the search engine’s search box, this will first need to happen. This can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months and unfortunately, is out of our control.

Until your site is indexed, people will be able to find your site by putting your address, such as mysite.com, into the browser window at the very top of the page.

There are some things that you can do to move the process of getting indexed along:

1. Search engines like Google show users the sites that they think the users will find useful.  The most important things you can do to ensure your site will be indexed is to create good, informative content and update your site frequently.


2. Search engines read text to know the topic of a page and there are three tags that specifically alert the search engine to what a page is about; the title, description and keywords tag. Yola provides an area to edit these tags; click on the Properties Tab on the Content Sidebar; it is a good idea to give each page of your website unique tags.
   
   The area labeled Window Title is where you will put your title tag. Your title tag should include the main keyword or concept of your page, your business or website name and your location if this would be important to your visitors; it should also be under 70 characters long. Here is a basic example:
   
   Fine Gold Jewelry | ABC Jewel Company | My Town, Texas
   
   The area labeled Description is where you will put your description tag. Your description tag should include your main keywords for the page, or variations of your keywords, as well as the name of your company and the location if this would be important to your visitors; it should be under 200 characters long and should entice Internet users to click. Here is a basic example:
   
   ABC Jewel Company provides customers in and around My Town, Texas with the finest yellow and white gold jewelry imported directly from Italy. Stop in today!
   
   The area labeled Keywords is where you will put in the main keywords for the page. Don't stuff keywords, only list keywords that apply to the content of the page. Here is a basic example:
   
   fine gold jewelry, gold jewelry, white gold jewelry, ABC Jewel Company, My Town Texas, TX
   
   You will also want to try to easily blend the keywords you utilized in your tags into the content on the page of the site. Again, don't stuff them in, blend them in casually making sure to keep the flow of your content.
   
   


3. You can submit your site to the search engines. This basically alerts the search engines to your site‘s existence and puts it on a list of sites to be crawled; this of course is no guarantee of inclusion in the search engines index but is quick to do and could speed the process along. Here are links to submit your site to be crawled to the three major search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN.


4. You can submit your site to Google through a program called Google Webmaster Tools.  We have posted a tutorial that walks you through the steps to do so here.


5. Another great way to promote your site and any updates you make is through Twitter. If you have a Twitter account, you can easily Tweet any changes or updates you make when you publish! For more information on this please see this thread in our forum: Twitter Button - Tweet your new site or your latest changes!. If you don't have a Twitter account and would like to get one to make use of this promotion tool, please go to Twitter.com and sign up for a Free account!


6. Search engines view sites that have many incoming links (links from other websites) as being more of an authority on a topic. Begin building links to your site by:

• Submitting your website directories on the Internet. It may seem appealing to get a company to submit your site to 200 directories for you, but this is not considered good practice by the search engines and can do more harm than good. Here is a link to a list of directories to get you started at bestcatalog.net.


• Submitting informative articles to article directories. When you do this you will be able to put an author bio at the end of the article with a link back to your website and by putting the article in the article directory you give others permission to reprint your article as long as they include your author bio; this will in turn give you more links back to your site and traffic. Here are a few to get you started: ideamarketers.com, ezinearticles.com and articlealley.com.


• Network with other webmasters in your industry, topic of interest and local area and offer to do a link exchange.