Help With Indexing

If your website is getting very little or no traffic at all, then you may want to learn how to get indexed fast by the search engines.

One of the key points in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is to rank for your keyword, but if you’re not listed in the search engines, then there’s absolutely no way that you can achieve your desired rankings.

To this end, you’ve got to get the word out that your website is ready for visitors — which leads us to another discussion on whether or not your site is truly ‘ready’ to be open to the public, but that’s a story for another day.

For the sake of argument, your site IS ready — there’s no “under construction”, or “come back soon” type pages or emptiness to be found. From here, you are going to want to visit a few URLs that will help kick-start your indexing.

One of my favorite starting points is IsMySiteIndexed? You do not need to sign up for anything, or even register, so it’s perfect for those just starting out with just one domain to worry about.

Here I will show you the process as I do it myself for this site. [WebGuruForHire.com]

I purposefully made the images smaller for 2 reasons. 1) to fit in the blog post and 2) so you don’t get confused and try to input your data in the  form fields.

So we start by inputting your domain’s URL into the box and then click the “Check Status” button. Give it a few seconds and you will be presented with another screen as, similar to the one below.

Here you can see the 3 red bars, indicating that this website was not in any of the 3 major search engine’s indexes — which isn’t good.

Below that you can see the OnPage Factors for SEO and these are the Title Tag, the Meta Description and Meta Keywords.

I highly suggest that you have something meaningful in each of these 3 areas. If not, you may want to consider getting some help to do so.

Below this [and if you have any content already on your site] you will see some excerpts from your webpages.

The final bit is a list that is built with your domain URL already embedded in the proper code for you to visit.

I suggest opening each one in a separate [new] tab or window — whichever you prefer. If you do not know how to do that, then it’s okay to click a link and then use the ‘Back’ arrow or button to return to this page. It doesn’t make or break the functionality of this process, it’s just something that us gurus do. 😉

So now you have an in-depth look at what your site looks like to the search engines and a few resources to get further noticed from these secondary sites on the list.

To take this one step further to help solidify your ability to be indexed quickly, I would copy the URL of the page on IsMySiteIndexed.com [something like http://ismysiteindexed.com/webguruforhire-com/] on to the clipboard [Control-C or Command-C for a Mac] and navigate to another website called PingOMatic.com.

Now fill out the first TWO fields. Do not worry about the RSS URL — like it says, it’s optional and I’ll talk more about that later on, but for now, ignore it.

See the picture as a reference guide. Then after you have the two fields filled out, click on the area that [now] says “Uncheck all” [it started out saying “Check All”] and it will automatically check all the boxes for you. Pretty neat huh?

The only thing left to do is to click the “Submit” button at the bottom of the page. [not shown in the picture because I’m a noob and cropped it out, but you should be able to follow my steps anyhow]

Okay, so let’s recap what we’ve done. We took your website to IsMySiteIndexed? and checked to see if it was already indexed by the top three search engines. Either way, it will show you the website’s Title Tag and the two Metas [description and keywords] which should be filled out. We then clicked on all of the links that IsMySiteIndexed? provided because that makes those ‘other’ sites aware of us too and that’s a good thing. To finish it off, we made doubly sure that we get noticed by ‘pinging’ [look it up on Google] your website by use of the free tools at PingOMatic.

So there you have it. Within 3 days or so, you should see your site in the search engines. Notice I didn’t say that it will be on the front page, but it will be noticed and if you remember this is the first stage to getting ranked [showing up in the front page].

Stay tuned for more information to help rise your site from number 134,842 to [hopefully] the Top Ten on Google.

If I have gone to fast, or forgot to mention something, please leave a comment below and I’ll address the issue right away. Heck, even if you understood it all, give me a shout out just so I know that you’re alive out there.

Thanks and we’ll talk soon!

-Kreg