The Search Engine ‘Index’

While it is important to know how a search engine ‘reads’ websites and stores them in its ‘index’, it is even more important (or more relevant) to know how to get included in it.

There is only one ‘serious’ way to get included into search engines, and it is this:

Get links from other websites to point to your website.

Submitting to search engine inclusion forms, using software that ‘guarantees’ to get your website included in search engines, paying spammers who offer to get your website indexed in 100+ search engines …

All of that is a waste of time. Avoid any such schemes like the plague, and steer clear of ‘search engine submission forms’.

Why?

Because getting indexed by search engines is a piece of cake IF you know how to do it.

But how do I get links?

There are several ways to easily get links for free pointing to your website (and if you are willing to pay, more
power to you) and you can usually have your website (or at least your site’s front page) indexed in Google in 2-4 days of launch.

Note: Later on in the book you will find a whole chapter on building links for the site launch phase, so do not worry too much now (or skip ahead to that chapter if you wish).

Crawling Frequency

Crawling is a term used to describe the behavior of search engine spiders (also known as ‘bots’ (short for robots) which are computer programs written to ‘read’ websites. These spiders use links to go from one website to the other (hence the need to get links to your website).

Crawling frequency is a measure of how often a website gets ‘read’ by a search engine. This frequency depends on a number of factors but the two main factors you want to worry about are:

If you get links from a website that is updated daily and has a lot of links pointing to it, you are bound to have the link to your site found quickly and get your website indexed.

Example:

Performancing.com is a very popular online resource for professional bloggers – it is updated daily and has tens of thousands of links pointing to it.

A link from such a website would have the search engine spiders knocking on your website’s proverbial door
very soon.

Another example:

Article directories such as EzineArticles.com are usually updated several times a day (with new articles uploaded every day) and have thousands of links pointing to them as well. Submitting an article to such article directories (if done the right way) will also help you get your website indexed quickly.

Recommended Resource: Article Submitter (http://articlesubmitter.imwishlist.com)

This is a free program that will submit your articles to hundreds of popular article directories across the internet. Note only will this get you a quality link pointing to your website from the article directory, but many other websites will likely pick up your article and syndicate it on their website, which will lead to many more links pointing to your website!

A paid example:

The Yahoo Directory (http://dir.yahoo.com/) is the biggest and most popular online directory. Inclusion costs $299/year, and as such it is not a cheap proposition.

The benefits, however, are often worth the costs. Inclusion in the Yahoo Directory (a process that takes a week’s time as they review your site) will not only guarantee that your website gets indexed in all search engines, your site rankings should also receive a boost (especially in the Yahoo Search index, which mixes directory results in its search results AND gives more importance to sites included in its directory).

These are just a few examples of how you can use high-powered links to get your website indexed quickly.

There is one caveat though – the examples I gave above, and other such sources of ‘power links’ are easy to get, but only if you know HOW to get them. I will explain how later, so for now let us look at the next part of the puzzle – search engine results.

Recommended Resource: Directory Submitter (http://directorysubmitter.imwishlist.com)

This is another free program that will submit your website to literally thousands of other website directories across the internet. While the Yahoo directory is an excellent, “paid” directory to submit your website to, there are also thousands of completely FREE website directories you can submit to.

Doing this submission manually will take you days and days of time, but using out free Directory Submitter software, you can do this much faster. Directory Submission is something that I highly recommend doing at the time I am writing this post. The more directories you can submit your website to, the more one-way links you’ll get pointing to your website, and the higher you will rank.

 Do you think it's easy to understand the search engines ?

Until next time! See you around ;-) ...