Whenever you create a new domain or even web page, you want to get the search engines to find it as quickly as possible and add it to its search engine index. This is referred to as “indexing”. Just by way of the technological improvements of search engines in the past 15 years or so, indexing speed continues to naturally improve. Still, you want to know that whenever you create new content it will be recognized and indexed by the search engines as soon as possible, so here are 8 methods for how to get your website indexed.
How to Get Your Website Indexed
Pinging
Pinging is a way of manually notifying search engines that they should check out your site as you have new content to share with them. If you use WordPress it’s supposed to automatically ping new content every time you create it making it that much easier. Check out this post on what is pinging for more information.
Backlinking
Creating backlinks to your content is likely the fastest way of how to get your website indexed because search engines recognize a backlink as a stamp of approval or quality. Another way of thinking about it is that another website is vouching for your content by linking to it, so if you create new content and immediately create one or more backlinks to it, search engines will check out that link and naturally and quickly find your content.
The more authority which the website which is passing the link to your site carries, the faster you’ll get indexed as higher authority sites get crawled by search engines more frequently than others. Here’s a ginormous list of 70 traffic sources, many of which can be tapped to create links back to your new content on your site.
Create Content
It makes a big difference if you create a few pages of content (even just a few paragraphs per page) versus just putting up a temporary “check back soon” construction page. I don’t know why you would be in a rush to get your site indexed without any content on it, but this still counts.
Create a Sitemap and Ping it
A sitemap is a formatted file with an XML extension. This file contains the URL for every page or post on your site and search engines like them because it’s a quick organized snapshot of all of your content. There are dozens of free plugins to create one click sitemaps for your site if you’re using a software like WordPress to house your site. Once you create the sitemap, ping it.
Internal Links
Creating internal links on your site from new content to older existing content is a good way to not only get new pages on an existing site indexed quickly, but it’s a good way of how to get your website indexed if it’s new, as well.
Add Google Analytics
This refers exclusively to Google, of course, but adding Google Analytics to your site forces Google to begin performing analytics on your site, thereby forcing it to acknowledge your site.
Use Adwords Advertising
This also applies exclusively to Google, but creating paid advertising ads through their Adwords program is another way to quickly get them to notice your site as every web page which gets linked to through an Adwords ad is thoroughly checked out by Google themselves.
Submit it Yourself
Of course you can also manually add your URL to Google using this link: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
By performing a number of these methods of how to get your website indexed, you should be able to find your content within a few hours.