Getting Indexed In Google
One of the first targets in an SEO campaign is making sure your website gets listed in the search engines. After all, you can’t hope to own Google top positions if your pages don’t even appear in the Google index.
Once upon a time, getting your pages listed in the search engines meant a very manual and often time consuming process. URLs were submitted and DMOZ listings created but you still had to wait several weeks or even months before your pages gradually started to show up let alone rank. Fortunately, times did change and search engines evolved.
The more recent technique that proved effective in getting a website listed was to create links from other websites. Google and other search engines would follow these links when crawling the net and when this happened, your web pages would be indexed.
Generally, Google spiders will visit a website every few weeks but if they find that the site is being updated more frequently than this then they will call by more often. As such, article directories, web directories, and other regularly updated websites are crawled by the Google bots very frequently and getting a link from such a site means that you can get your pages indexed and listed in Google results in a few hours or, at the most, a day or two.
Another popular method of ensuring Google inclusion is the use of an XML sitemap, submitted through Google Webmaster Tools and similar webmaster related search engine dashboards. Again, this method takes just a couple of days and offers the benefit that you can let Google know whenever you make changes. You can also remove pages and update the indexes with these changes; something that won’t always take effect if you leave the spiders to spin their own webs.
If you intend to use the search engines in a bid to deliver targeted traffic to your website and web pages then you will need to start building links and the sooner you do this, the sooner you will start to reap the benefits. Get your content on site and get your linking going as early as possible.
Getting indexed in Google and other search engines is not as manual or tedious a task as it once way. In fact, if you start an SEO link building campaign from the beginning of your website life then you will quickly find your site listed in all of the main indexes.