Built a new website recently? In that case, one of the crucial first steps is getting it indexed by Google and other search engines as soon as possible. If your website has not yet been picked up by search engines, you’re obviously missing out on lots of juicy traffic. This post outlines a quick and simple method for ensuring that every new site you create gets indexed and listed very quickly.

The Wrong Approach

First, let’s take a quick look at what not to do, in order to get your site listed. Every search engine has some option for manual site submission. You can find a link somewhere that says something along the lines of “Register your site with Google”. You can then enter your website’s URL and submit it to be indexed or “crawled” by the search engine in question.

There are even services that offer to submit your site to search engines for you.

Avoid both of these things. Manually submitting your site to a search engine is a waste of time and using a service to have it done is a waste of money. After manual submission, it can take days or even weeks before your website actually gets indexed and what’s the point in having your site submitted to hundreds of search engines no one uses?

Here’s What to Do Instead

Here’s how to get your site indexed super-fast, in a nutshell: Make sure that there are links on popular sites, pointing to your website.

Why do you want to do this? The more popular and frequently updated a site is, the more often it gets visited by search engine spiders. Google sends it’s “bot” to those sites every few hours or even more frequently to make sure they have all the new content listed in their search results. Now, if a link to your website appears on such a highly popular site, the Google bot will see that link, follow it and find your site. And since it was linked to from an important website, your website will get indexed soon thereafter.

Ok, great, but how do you do this?

Forum Sig-Lines
Register with a forum (or use one you’re all registered with), write some posts and add a link to your site in the sig-line. Make relevant and interesting posts! Don’t spam!

Social Bookmarking
Bookmark your site on delicious, mixx, folkd or any of the other few hundred bookmarking sites out there. The links on bookmarking sites get posted instantly and search engine bots are usually not far away.

Article Submission
Simply write a short article on a topic relevant to your site and submit it to a free article directories.You can place a link to your site in your “bio box”, “about me” section or signature of the article. Submit the article to ezinearticles, articlesbase or goarticles and it’s sure to get picked up by the search engines quickly.

If you do all of the above, your site will probably get indexed in a matter of hours. A word of caution: Don’t abuse these options. Don’t create a spammy sales-site and submit each and every page to Digg. Don’t write a crappy, “empty” article and submit it to article directories. Don’t annoy people on the forums by posting irrelevant comments and having an obnoxious collection of links in your signature.

These things will not only hurt your reputation and prevent people from clicking your links, they will most probably also get you banned from the respective sites and with that, you’ll lose those backlinks as well.
In other words, while you are working for the search engine’s attention, don’t forget the human visitors that might get involved..

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