It's no secret that Google uses in-bound links as a way of assessing the importance and subject of your site. By this I mean it works out how many sites link to your site, and what keywords they use in their link. It also factors in the 'importance' of the sites that are linking to you based on their 'page rank' which is a the value (on a scale of 1 - 10) attributed to the site by Google. If a high 'page rank' site links to your site it is deemed to be a valuable link, which in turn will boost your own 'page rank'. See these for more details:

http://www.google.com/technology/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

Before your site can even get a page rank it needs to indexed and listed. Before it can be indexed and listed, it needs to be found by the search engine. So how does that happen?

There are two schools of thought in this, either adding your URL directly with the search engines, or using inbound links to direct them to your site more naturally. Or some combination of both methods.

Add URL
The first is to submit your URL directly to the search engines using the 'add url' pages that they provide, e.g.

Google - http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
Yahoo - http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html

This method should in theory allow them to index your site quickly and efficiently. However, there is some debate as to whether this is counter productive.

Sites submitted in this way are usually new sites, and often those that do not have a large number of inbound links. This leads some people to believe that as 'new sites' the search engines discriminate against them and delay their full index. There is debate about whether a 'google sandbox' exists which is supposedly a holding area of newly submitted sites until they move into the main index.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandbox_Effect (note this article is disputed)

Google denies there is any sandbox, and others speculate that this observed phenomenon is merely the result of how the complex Google algorithms index sites and their constant battle against spammers.

Inbound links
The other less controversial way to get your site listed is by inbound links, particularly those that contain your most important keywords in the link text, and come from sites which have content that is related to your own.

Even a single high quality inbound link can put the search engines onto your site and get it indexed quickly. Once at your site, they will then spider all the pages and work out how it links together.

There are several ways to go about getting good inbound links, and there are certainly more than we list here, but these are a few recommended ideas.

  • Add your site to relevant local directories - these might be business directories, or interest/subject based directories, but make sure they are reputable
  • Contact webmasters of related sites as ask for reciprocal link exchanges - this is where you place a link on your site to them in exchange for a link on their site to you. Don't be too ambitious with this, as big sites are not going to link to you out of the blue. Try to find sites of a similar size and subject who can help each other.
  • Write articles about your subject including a link to your site - any article must actually contain useful information otherwise it won't get published. So if you're an expert in the area your writing about, and it is relevant to your site, then write about it and give the article to other site owners who are likely to publish it with a link back to your site. Make sure the article contains some of your relevant keywords. (This may also be possible with useful contributions to blog articles or forums, but be very careful about link spamming - if you don't have anything genuinely useful to say, don't say it!)

Once your site has been indexed, you're in a much stronger position for the future. Sites that have been around for a long time have a legitimate history and tend to stay in the indexes. If you have an existing site that is indexed, then try linking that one to your new site.

You can see if your site is listed by typing 'site:www.youraddress.com' into Google or Yahoo. Remember if you have multiple domain names make sure you try each of them.

And if you're using your own domain name make sure you are using the IP pointing method we recommend, and not the masked forwarding often offered by domain companies. Masked forwarding will make it very difficult for your site to get listed, as it appears to have no contents!

So there you have it. Let's get listed!

(I linked my site www.joeslondontaxis.com from the last article - I'll find out soon whether it gets listed or not)

Next Article in Series: SiteMaker and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - Part IV