I have been bombarded with emails lately from people asking me how to quickly get a new site in Google, so this post is for those of you with new sites or old sites that need some new love. Typically when I create a new website I see it indexed the day I post it, and I have seen sites get indexed within 1-2 hours of their creation. While getting indexed quickly is always fun, just remember that being in the index doesn’t necessarily mean you will rank for any valuable keywords, or even for the name of your own site for that matter.
The first thing you should do once your website is live is post the domain to Google and other search engines. I have always used AddMe for my search engine submission just because it was the first thing on Google when I created my first website and they have never let me down. I wouldn’t sign up for the newsletter though, it is basically just all advertisements.
The second thing you should do is create a sitemap and submit this to Google’s Webmaster Tools, this will ensure that all of your content gets included in the index, not just your homepage. There are plenty of free tools out there to create a sitemap, I typically just use whatever is at the top of a Google search.
The third step is to check your website’s onpage search engine optimization, especially check to see that every page links to another page in some way, try to have as many pages link to each other as possible to give a more thorough distribution of PageRank and spidering later on in the process.
The fourth step is pretty simple, create a robots.txt file for your website. Without a robots.txt file search engines are not allowed to index your website, and as a result you won’t ever get indexed. Just create a blank text file that says “User-agent: *” then next line “Disallow: ” named robots.txt and put it on the domain level directory on your server. Leave disallow blank unless you have pages you don’t want indexed.
The fifth step is the most fun, because this is where you will get your first backlinks to your website. This is the key to getting indexed in hours. The way that Google determines when to index your site is either by putting you in a line via webmaster tools, or by finding your site via their crawler. It can take months to get indexed without any backlinks, so it is essential that you build backlinks pointing to your site. The way I typically do this is by submitting my site to StumbleUpon, Digg, and Furl then I go onto all of the forums I post on, and change my signature to have a link to my new website. As a result, I rarely have to wait more than 5 hours to get indexed. To make this even more likely to be successful, post on popular do-follow blogs as well.
Sixth step is simply checking the results, a day or so after following these steps try typing site:www.yourdomain.com and see whether you have made it into Google. If you are, congratulations, start working on your content and building relevant links to start ranking for keywords. If you aren’t wait 3 days and if you still aren’t then start commenting on more blog posts, especially new ones.
With this site, I typically see my new posts indexed within half an hour, I have seen them indexed in as little as 7 minutes before (As a side note, this post got indexed 5 minutes after it was posted). To get more tips and tricks download my new ebook which is an internet marketing ebook with a focus on blogging, “Blogging 101: Traffic and Link Development Tips”.
I’m actually getting indexed without any inbound links using some of the things you list here and without using the “AddMe” feature at Google. It seems site maps are doing most of the work for my new sites. While I haven’t primed back links with changing signatures, it’s something I can try after reading this article. Thanks.
Best,
Justin