I am often asked about “web site submission” software. Its something I’ve considered offering but I just don’t think this is the best way of getting a new web site listed by the search engines. Also I don’t like the idea of offering products I don’t use, and I have only used search engine submission software once, a few years back and was deluged with spam.
Even using web site submission software, getting your site listed is not an instantaneous process. It may take at least 8 weeks for the Googlebot or Yahoo spider to finally visit your site (and even then not deep crawl it).
Quite frankly Search Engines are not that interested in sites *you* have to tell it about, and even when your site is crawled and listed, there is no guarantee of a good search engine position for your given keywords.
If only life were so easy. Submit your site and forget! Unfortuneatly it isn’t that easy and getting your site crawled and listed is only the start of an ongoing process of maintenance and building your “web presense.”
No, Google and the other search engines tend to give a preference to sites *they* discover or happen to stumble upon. Generally speaking this involves building a gradual “web presense” over the years by making your site popular and getting lots of other (hopefully popular) sites to link back to you.
But how to “kick start” this process?
Here is an approach I have used to get “brand new domains” listed in Google within a week, and actually receiving a little search engine traffic. It involves using what some almost consider to be a “Google backdoor” which is to setup a site on Google’s own Blogging Service - blogger.com.
Now you might say, “what has blogging got to do with me?” or “I want to create a website, not a blog!”
I say you should still consider the blogging route, even as a subdomain (ie: myblog.mydomain.com) or a subfolder (ie: www.mydomain.com/blog) which points to your main site. Especially with regard to Personal Web Sites, as a blog is much easier to maintain, than a static conventional web site, requires minimal web design skills, and as you will see, with a blog you stand a far better chance of getting noticed!
Now lets get started:
- Register a domain name. If you have not already done so. Do not opt of the whois if its a UK domain.
- Register a domain for as long as possible. (though in the case of a UK domain you are currently limited a term of 2 years).
- If its the UK market you are aiming for choose a co.uk domain name. This may give you an advantage in google.co.uk search engine placements.
- Setup a web hosting account. Once again if you are hoping to get UK search results a UK hosted site might give you an advantage, over sites that purport to originate from the UK but are actually hosted say in the US or Germany. Quick Plug: Weycrest Hosting is UK Based!
- Create a free account on blogger.com, used the advanced setup facility so its not actually hosted by blogger.com but on the web hosting space you have just purchased. (You will build your blog on blogger.com and it will then automatically upload your blog to your hosted webspace with Weycrest.Com). The reason I suggest you do it this way, is that your own domain name and webspace gives you some independence and security from blogger.com. Also `mycompanyblog.blogspot.com` does not look terribly professional and you have to attempt differentiate yourself from the loads of “spamblogs” that people create every day. Also by developing and promoting your domain you are creating a brand or intellectual property in that domain name. If you were successful it would not be very easy to sell off “someblogat.blogger.com” as its not your domain name.
- Add relevant content to your blogger blog, ideally original content or article announcing your site. I have used in the past substantially re-written ezine articles, relevant to the site I’m developing. So if its about “home improvements” find articles related to that. Perhaps you could take one article and split it into three. Ideally right fresh original material on a subject you are knowledgable about.
- Avoid the temptation at this stage to load your blog with adsense advertising and affiliate links (even if your eventual purpose to earn income from advertising).
- Publish the blog (usually a couple of articles or posts is sufficient). Ensure blogger pings the relevant blog services (which by default it does).
- The above alone will get you into Google blog search and crawled within hours, (try blogsearch.google.com) however the extra thing I do is to link from one of my sites which has a modest Page Rank (and which is broadly related to the content of your website/blog).
- An extra twist is to add your new blog/sites rss feed to your Google and Yahoo home pages. Also start adding your site / blog to the various free web directories and social bookmarking sites
if you check out some of the SEO sites there are people (usually based in India) who will manually submit your site to 100 or so directories (or your articles to 100 ezines) and provide an report via excel spreadsheet report) for a modest paypal payment.
However 100 backlinks all at once, may be “too much, too soon” for many search engines and building backlinks at a more steady rate and organic rate would be safer.
The above six steps will get a domain/site indexed by Google in under a week and I’ve actually had search results in under a week (not many though as although the site is indexed you are unlikely to rank well except for a really strange “Niche” phrase).
I always use blogger.com to start as it works better. Once your site is indexed you could move it to Wordpress or of course develop your website it as a more normal website. Indeed Wordpress has an import function that simplifies this.
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