Get Listed in Google

by Jason Dowdell

Getting listed in Google may not be as hard as most people think. Sure there can be hurdles but for the most part it's an easy process.

Before you ever think about getting Google to index your web site you need to make sure your web site is ready to be indexed by Google. This means several items need to be in order. Here is a list of items Google recommends you comply with.

Design and Content Guidelines:

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.

Create a useful, information-rich site and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.

Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.

Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.

Check for broken links and correct HTML.

If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a '?' character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them small.

Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Technical Guidelines:

Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would.

If fancy features such as Javascript, cookies, session ID's, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.

Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session ID's or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.

Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.

Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it's current for your site so that you don't accidentally block the Googlebot crawler.

If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system can export your content so that search engine spiders can crawl your site.
Once all of these things have been dealt with you are ready to submit your site to Google.

Here comes the good stuff... There are two ways to get your site listed in Google once your website is compliant.

1. Submit directly
You can use the free google submission form on GlobalPromoter.com but this does not guarantee indexing by Google. Google states that they do not have the free site submission as a priority but they do collect them every 3 - 6 months.

2. Get a Qualified Backlink
This is the secret most search engine optimization experts don't want you to know. All it takes is a good inbound link to your site from a site with a high Google PageRank for you to get listed in Google.

How does this work you say? Google views outbound links from sites with a high PageRank as "important" links and thus will index the site that is being linked to. This gets your foot in the door and will get your website indexed within days, not weeks.

Depending on how often the Googlebot spiders the site that links to you will determine how quickly your site is indexed. Typically, high traffick sites will be spidered multiple times a day by Google in order to ensure freshness of the Google database.

Need more help?
Hire us to do the work for you or to give you a consultation on how to get to the first page of the major search engines for your keywords.

Get Listed in Google