Google is our top search engine but we also use other key players like Yahoo!, MSN, Ask Jeeves, Altavista and Teoma, as each search engine adds its own spice. You can rely on Google to give you the best resultant links with the content that you are looking for. This is due to Googlers who aggressively stick to their Quality value - There is no paid inclusion into the main results which is absolutely free and depends on the quality of your site - and to the Freshness of their main results.
Submit your Site to Google for Free
Submitting your site to Google is very easy and absolutely free. All you need to do is submit your home page URL to Google and your whole site will be indexed. Click to Submit your site to Google (Please note that for a new site Google can take upto 3-6 months to improve your ranking after it initially indexes it, so instead of worrying about why your ranking is low, you can use this time to optimize and promote your website).
Getting Listed in Google
Google uses a "crawler or spider" - robots that automatically index pages on the web - called GoogleBot. Google usually takes an average of 6-8 weeks to index a newly submitted site. When you submit your site URL to Google, GoogleBot pick's up and goes through each link on each page. It reads through all your site pages to pick up keywords, then saves and indexes the pages in its catalog cache. Thus it is important for you to keep all your pages linking to each other so that the google spiders have easy access to all your relevant pages. Another way to make sure this is done is to have a Site Map for all you pages.
Important: Getting indexed by GoogleBot is just the first step to getting ranked in Google, so don't expect immediate results for your pages to show up in searches. Give it some time and work on optimizing your web pages.
Why is getting listed with Google Important?
Not only is Google the single most important search engine, it is also used to provide the "main results" for various other search engines. Google also provides its "Paid Results Ads" to search engines like HotBot, Lycos, Ask Jeeves and Teoma apart from the old AOL Search & Netscape.
Google's Page Rank Technology & Getting Ranked in Google
Getting a high ranked in Google is different from being indexed by the Google Spider - GoogleBot. You might have been indexed by Google but your site might be one of hundreds of thousands in connection with your keywords and you might not appear in the first 10 pages (beyond which you can safely assume no one will seriously search).
This is mainly because Google looks at the quality of the web pages linking to each site to obtain the most relevant search results. Thus more than link popularity, link quality is what matters to Google. In fact this is the single best way to get ranked with all "crawler" based search engines. Build your site links by promoting your site pages to as many relevant portals that accept external links - especially those with top ranking in Google. You can also get into link exchanges with top sites in google that have a good ranking (provided you keep a track of these sites in case they do more harm than good). Google gives a different rank for each of your pages so it is important to optimize your whole web site.
You need to also make sure you have valuable content for Google searchers. What you can do is, concentrate on keywords (or rather key phrases) that is unique to your content. This will also ensure that you get more targeted visitors from Google.
Tips on Google Search Engine Optimization for your web site
- Build quality links to your site pages from other well ranked sites on Google.
- Make sure you provide quality content that have something unique to offer and that have keywords or key phrases people might search to find your site in Google.
- Optimize you web site pages by making sure your top keywords appear in your title, meta tags and content.
- If you sell products, give something away free (The word "free" is one of the top most searched words on the internet).
Keep a track of your listings/ranking in Google and analyze it periodically. Some google tips on this:
- Indexed Pages: To know which pages on your site are listed in the google and to see how they will appear to google searchers type site:www.yourdomainname.extn in the google search box.
- Link Popularity: To keep a track of sites that link to you (and also see their google page rank), type link:www.yourdomainname.extn in the google search box.