How to Tell Google About Your New Site?

UPDATED for 2019 – The post below was first written in 2011, some things haven’t changed in that time for example Google is still Mega important and you want to make sure your site is indexed on there as soon as possible. 
Back then it could take up to 6 months for a new site to be indexed fully, it does generally speaking happen quicker now. But it still takes work to build up the ranks – if you’ve got a new site then this is how we told Google about it back then and how it’s done now.
In order to get your site to appear in the main search engines you need to tell them that the site is out there.

You could use www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl after all you enter your url / web address enter the “prove you’re real” code, job done.  But then all you can do is sit and wait.  In my experience this is the slowest way to get your site listed on Google.

UPDATED for 2019 in fact the function on the link doesn’t even exist.  They tell you submit a sitemap (see below) or to fetch as google.

So how should I add my site to Google?

The quickest and most efficient way I’ve found of getting a site listed in Google is to follow these steps.

1) Make sure it’s ready -is your site is finished or at least presentable, for people to see. Google may find you quickly, but may take a few weeks for the spiders that crawl websites to get back to check.  So by having all your info, your keywords, your descriptions, the site all set for visitors, it means that if the do take a little while to get back they already have the right information.  Nothing worse than seeing your new site on Google with glaring spelling mistake for all to see.

2) Add your sitemap – Create and add a sitemap to Google and Bing Webmaster tools, this means when the spiders arrive at your site they’ll be able to find their way round and hopefully explore as much of the site as is possible as quickly as possible.

3) Get Links – Google’s little spiders search back through all it’s known sites, the more often a site is updated the more often it’s likely to be crawled.  So good places to get some early links would be active forums and blogs.  Also if you got a web designer to create your site, they might add a link to your site (especially if good if they have good pr (page rank) on the page you’re listed on.

3) Social Bookmarking –  Submit to bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, etc. there are lots out there. Bookmarking sites are a way of saving links of sites, blogs etc of interest, and sharing them with others, it’s way of showing you liked something on the web and you can then share it with friends and followers.  The more votes a link has, the more popular it was.   But even if you just add it once for the purpose of getting Google listed it all helps, and ideally in time you’ll get more votes.    

UPDATED  for 2019 Social bookmarking does still exist but less so than it did back then for some area of interest.  I guess the more visual businesses moved on to things like Pinterest using images rather than the text, but doesn’t mean that it’s not worthwhile checking out DIGG as they are still around

4) Social Networking – Adding links on sites like Twitter and Facebook, will hopefully help direct traffic, but they also help to get the search engines attention.  These links should not be your only links though as they don’t appear to give much juice. 

UPDATED  for 2019 This is actually how I get Googles quick attention.  I post a like out to my new site on Facebook – I still have my twitter account and some people do use it but generally speaking Facebook  has been where my main attention has been and recently added Instagram to my collection.  The links don’t carry much sway in terms of SEO but they can help to direct people interested in your brand to your site.  

The bonus of getting listed using links rather than submitting it directly, is the links will also count in your SEO efforts for to get a better ranking.  Using the right combination you could get listed in just days, rather than weeks, be aware though that although you’re indexed on the search engine it will take time for your rank to emerge and settle, so keep going with the link building and reap the rewards when it does.

UPDATED for 2019 social media and Google still rule the world as far your website in concerned – there’s other ways people may find like Youtube videos, you but for small businesses just getting started making sure you have a presence on them is key. 

Do you use any other methods? want to share?

So contact Pippas web to see how I could help your start up or small business.