So many times I’ve heard this same question, “Why don’t I see my website in Google?” There are so many website owners that have the misconception that having a beautiful (or expensive) website will attract many internet visitors.
Unfortunately, internet visitors don’t magically find your website, just like you don’t magically know where the nearest TV repair shop is or best car dealership is until someone tells you about the place or you see their advert in the newspaper or magazine.
Majority of internet visitors make use of the search engines as a quick and easy tool to search for what they are looking for.
Submitting your website to the search engines:
Your website is all polished off and you are now ready to launch your website. At present there are 3 major search engines that are worth submitting your website to, Google, Yahoo and MSN. Google being the biggest out of all of them, let’s talk about that today.
There are two ways to submit your website to Google, via their Domain Submission form, or via their Webmaster Tools page. I would highly recommend that you submit your website via the Webmaster Tools section, as you can not only submit your website and sitemap (sitemap – an index of all the pages on your website), but you can also get some very handy website information, “Search keywords visitors used to find your website, where your website is ranking, how many hits your website got etc.
To sign up for the Google Webmaster Tools is free, sign up for it here: www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Please take note that even if you submit your website to Google today, Google can take from 3 – 6 months before they properly index you in their database, so be patient.
