Once you've gotten your website far enough along that you feel ready to tell the world about it, you go through a process called "search engine submission." Search engine submission is when you notify the search engines, like Google, of your website address ("URL") and topic. There are a lot of free places to submit your site and there are others that charge a modest fee.
Once you submit your URL to the search engines, the idea is that the search engines will send out a spider and your site will be indexed. Indexing is when your site is officially listed in a search engine's archives. It's the first step in having your site come up when someone searches for you or your topic.
The trick, though, is that spiders have only so much time to spend, so it's important that you take full advantage of their visits.
You see, your website is not indexed as a whole, but is indexed by the individual pages. The spider follows the URL address you submit and if it has the time, it will follow your links and continue to explore and categorize what your site is about. Unless your site is immediately recognized as an authority site (content rich, lots of links to you from other sites, etc.) then it may take many visits from the spiders to have all of the pages of your site indexed.
New sites have a hard time being recognized as an authority site right out of the bin, so to help you get indexed, I recommend creating and submitting a site map page URL, instead of your home page URL, to Google.
A site map is simply a table of contents of your entire site. It contains links to all the pages within your site. Just like an index of a book gives you a roadmap of a book, a site map gives you an overview of a website.
When spiders visit your site map, since the only content there to explore is your links, that's what they do. Exploring your links leads them to all the other pages of your site that they may not have had the time yet to do in one home page URL visit before. Pretty nifty, right?
My personal experience this week is that I had submitted my original home page URL to Google and I had my home page indexed in about 3 weeks. When I submitted my site map page, all of my pages were indexed---24 of them--- in 3 days time. I can testify first hand that this suggestions works.
Site maps are so important that Google has very recently implemented a Site Map function that allows you to use their tools to create a site map for your website. It's got some problems with it, as your site may not be programmed with the format they required, but even so, Google is coming around to the importance of a site map.
It's time for you to come around to it also. If you don't have a site map page, create one today.
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Contributor's Note
These tips are designed to help the Internet newbie. I hope you enjoy them!
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