So how do search engines find your site?

Search engines use spiders (aka crawlers/bots) to follow links on pages, scan the pages they find and then index them. In order to get a search engine spider to visit your page you can:

1. Submit your URL (website address) directly to a search engine;
2. Have a backlink on another (preferably popular) website that spiders will follow to find your site. This is the best option. All major search engines should be able to find your site via the backlink on external pages.

You should not use any kind of automated search engine submission software widely available on the internet. First of all it’s a waste of money, you can have great results without it. Secondly, some search engines simply don’t like it.

How long does it take to appear in search engines?

After being spidered you can expect to appear in major search engines (Yahoo, MSN and Google) within a few days or weeks. Please note that not all pages get included into search engines. Google says: “We do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.”

How do I tell whether my website is indexed or not?

Just make this simple search on the search engine you want to check:

"Site:http://www.yourdomain.com"

(there are slight variations).

This will also tell you the number of pages they have indexed for your site. Examples for this website:

• Google
• Yahoo Search
• MSN Live Search

What happens if I update my website?

When search engines know about your site, they will revisit you on a regular basis to update their index. The intervals depend on how popular your website is and how often you update it. You can also ask them to revisit sooner or later through special Meta tags.

How do I make sure all my pages get indexed?

First of all, you need to make sure that search engine spiders can actually find the rest of your pages by following links on your site - so interlink all your pages. Secondly, it is a good idea to have a sitemap. I will cover this in more depth later on.

Please note that some search engines cannot read certain types of files and scripting languages. For example, search engines can be aware of the images on your page but they will not be able to pick up the text you have on your picture. Flash websites can also be hard to index and most search engines cannot read Javascript.

What is a nofollow?

“Nofollow” is an HTML tag that tells the search engines to ignore (”not follow”) a link. Instead of having your link look something like this:
<a href=”http://www.example.com/”>anchor</a>, you can add a nofollow tag to make it look like this:
<a href=”http://www.example.com/” rel=”nofollow”>anchor</a> (red coloring added for emphasis).

This tag was first implemented by Google in an attempt to tackle link spam, but can be used to prevent so-called “PR bleed”, i.e. too many out links from your website. I will cover this topic in more depth later on.

General tips:

• Content is King! Search engines love fresh and relevant content. Note the words “fresh” and “relevant”. This means the content on your website should compliment your theme, e.g. car content on an auto website. In addition, you should try and keep this content “fresh” through regular updates.
• Limit the images and flash. Try not to flood your pages with images and fancy flash graphics as they mean little for SEO as search engines cannot read them. They also make your website slower and you can loose visitors because of that.
• Respect other people’s copyrights and do not copy large chunks of text from other websites. It is illegal to copy content without due credit, or as “fair use”, and you may get penalized for duplicate content. Always try and make your website content your own.

Next: 3) SEO (Backlinks)