How To Get Your Website Indexed Quickly
The first thing you might want to do once you've completed your website is submit it to the search engines so you can begin to get visitors. Before you do this, you should realize it could take several weeks before your site will become indexed this way. There is a much faster method.
Search engine spiders will periodically visit all the websites contained in their index (the frequency depends on the popularity of the website; the most popular ones can be visited daily). When the spider visits a page in its index, it will follow all the links on that site to visit the next site. Once there, it will follow all the links on that site to get the next site, and so on. This is how the spiders find new websites (without submitting them).
The key is to get a link on a website, that is already indexed, to point to your newly created site. If you get a link on a site that is re-indexed daily, you may find your site indexed in just a couple days.
There are many ways you can get a link pointing to your website from an indexed site. Link exchange networks and article directories are a couple of examples that cost very little, if nothing at all. You can also create a press release that announces your new site or purchase some cheap advertising that includes a link to your site. However, be careful not to overdo this. The search engines tend to assume that a new site shouldn't have a lot of back links already pointing to it. It's ok to launch your site with a few quality links, but don't get carried away; one or two should be good enough to get your site indexed quickly. It's always better to build up your links slowly anyway - building link popularity is supposed to take a bit of time, have patience.
A good place to buy cheap ads is USFreeads.com - the free membership will not allow you to include any links in the add, but you can purchase a yearly 'Gold' membership for about $10 that allows you to run up to 25 text-based ads at a time, which can include a link to your website.
You can also purchase a Premium membership that allows you to run unlimited html-based ads for about $15 a month. This site is very popular with the search engines and is indexed regularly. It is a great way to get your site indexed quickly and the Gold membership is a cheap way to start for anyone on a limited budget; plus you always have the opportunity to upgrade your account at a later time.
A sitemap for every search engine
It can sometimes take a long time to get every page on your site indexed by the search engines. This is especially true if you have pages that are buried in a deep page hierarchy. The best thing to do to get all pages indexed is to create a site map. This is basically a page that has a link to every other page within your site and you put a link to the site map on your main page. When a search engine spider first visits your site, it will tend not to delve too deeply into the link hierarchy, maybe only two or three levels. By having a site map available on the main page, every page on your website is no more than two link levels away, so the spiders can easily index every single page.
Every search engine handles indexing websites a little differently. There are ways to tell a search engine precisely what pages your website contains without having to wait for their spiders to crawl your site.
Besides having a sitemap that contains a link to every page on your website, you can also create sitemap files that are read separately by the search engines. These sitemap files contain every internal link your website contains and are typically located at the root (the highest level) of your site. So, when a search engine spider visits your site, it immediately download your sitemap file and know immediately all the pages that are contained on your site. This is especially useful for any websites that do not contain links to every single page (usually need to be accessed via some sort of search on the site).
Each type of search engine has its own way in which it likes the sitemap files to be formatted. Google likes to have and XML file, which allows additional information to be associated with the page such as its priority and how often it's updated. Yahoo's sitemap file is simply a text file that contains a list of all the links on the website. There is also a generic XML sitemap file that other search engines use.
It is a good idea to create sitemap files for all the main search engines, particularly Google and Yahoo. Creating these files can take time, but luckily there are tools that will crawl your site for you and generate these files.
XML-Sitemaps.com has a free online sitemap generator that will create different sitemap files for you. It will even create an html version of the sitemap you can add to your website to allow visitors to click the various links. There is also a feature that notifies you of any broken links it finds, which can be extremely useful.
