The BEST WAY to get your site into the Search engines...quickly!

Most people bash out a web page or two then head off to a free (or paid) autosubmitter, submit their page (s) and sit back and wait. Somewhere between 20 days and 40 days their site pops up (often 35-40 days for Google) or sometimes.... not! Disaster! Other people make a long slow slog round each search engine by hand, and get exactly the same result.

I show you how the professionals get multiple pages indexed by Google often within 48 hours, how to help the rest of the search engines play catch-up and the best way of submitting.

So you have a new site. It might be 1 page long or 200, the process you should go through is pretty much the same.

First turn off any search engine toolbars you have from Google, Yahoo, Alexa etc These spy tools will spoil your submission results. Keep them turned off until post-submission when they will actually work for you.

Now go and join a few forums. Say one web design, one close to the topic of your site, and one general www forum. Make sure that they allow 'signatures' with links in (most do) and that you can have links as part of a post (most do). Make sure they are indexed on G by doing a site search (ie site:wwwsomeforum.org) Make one or two posts a day to reach board, in reply to other members posts is fine. Why? you will find out later...

Put a robots.txt file on your site see http://www.robotstxt.org/ if you have never done this before. Make sure that any admin areas of your site or private data is disallowed in the file. Make an HTML (not google xml)  sitemap with all your site pages except admin/private on there as links, place a link at the bottom of every page to this sitemap. Dont forget to update it when you add a page.

Next check your page(s). The top reasons a listing attempt fails are Invalid or poor HTML, Duplicated Titles, and too many broken links. Forget trying to optimise anything else for the moment. Until you are actually listed it could be counter productive.

Time to check your page out. Head over to http://validator.w3.org/ , if your page is not online yet you can upload it as a file. When the site has finished you will get a nice little report, on average it will say 80 errors, 25 warnings the first time out. This time only fix the 2-4 things found under 'notes and potential issues' then check your page again. Probably now you have 20 errors and 5 warnings or so. Work your way through these and fix all you can (some may be caused by 3rd party adverts which you can do nothing about).

Is your page title unique? Try doing a google search on your exact page title in quotes like this (the title from my recent ebook site):

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&rlz=1B3GGGL_enGB310GB311&q="Ebooks+download+free+pdf+ebooks+and+commercial+ebooks+plus+wwwtokens"&btnG=Search&meta=

You should get nothing! If you find 5000 mentions of your title then you know you must choose something else. Do not forget to check that every page on your site has a title different from another. If your site is code-generated (a blog, or links directory say) make sure the code puts a different title on each page.

Now go to http://validator.w3.org/checklink and check your page/site for broken links. Fix any the system finds. Now you have a clean page its time to submit...or not lol.

In keeping with the Zen of WWW we are beginning our submitting by not submitting. Why? Simple. Google is the 'king' of the search engines and it gives extra weight to naturally discovered links. This is where your forums come in. First change your signature to include a link to your new sites index page.

Now choose 3 pages (or just the one if you only have one) from deep within your site, not the index page, and post a new topic on each forum something like:

'hi guys I just put up a new page at (hyperlink to your site) about (subject) - can some of you have a look at it please? I am not quite sure about the design ...'

Dont forget that in the link text of the hyperlink you should have a keyword relevant to that page.

Since forums have constantly changing content Google often re-indexes them every 12-24 hours. You have just put 10-30 links in to your index page, and a few links to pages deeper in your site in prime positions. Also the links in will be followed by forum members, some of whome will have google tool bars... result is instant listing so long as your pages are clean. Imagine what happens if you get into the habit of posting one message a day on 3-4 forums. By the end of a year you have 900-1000 places where you have a signature displayed. Every time you put up a new site/page change your signature for 3 months or so... bam - instant 1000+ quality incoming links. Instant indexing.

Now check every day. Make a note of when your site appears in Google and how many pages (use the site: command in search as we discussed earlier). When all or 90% of your pages are indexed there, its time to give the other search engines a helping hand.
Go to google and do the site search for your site, copy the url that appears in your browser navigation box. Go to http://tinyurl.com and generate a smaller url (disguising the link to a search engine so the 'bot follows it) add the new url as a link in your sitemap right at the top.

Now just do a general search on your site name (in quotes) and do the same.

Finally go to any free autosubmitter or get a free copy of webceo or whatever you used before and submit your sitemap url, not your index page. Now you can turn your toolbars back on again.

This is the professional way to get indexed, quickly and with the most bang for your buck!