Content

• Steps
• Method 1 of 2: Check Status
• Method 2 of 2: Get Indexed

A site without visitors is like a bicycle for a fish. Useless! If you've now created a website, how can anyone other than your friends and family know about it? They will certainly see it on Google! But before this can work, your site must be recognized or indexed so that it appears in search results. We will show you how to do this.

Steps

Method 1 of 2: Check Status

1. 1 Check the status of the index. You can tell pretty quickly if your site has been indexed by doing a couple of simple searches.
   • Your first thought might be "google it". There are actually 2 primary search engines - Google and Bing. Please note that Bing actually includes Bing, MSN, and Yahoo.
2. 2 Open up Google.com and look for your url. If it doesn't appear, it hasn't been indexed yet.
3. 3 Repeat with [1]. This one will probably show what is being indexed and the others not.
   • Searching your site's content as opposed to its URL might give you erroneous results. For example, if you have a juggling site, you do a search for "juggle" and you don't find your site on the first pages, you might assume that it hasn't been indexed. But keep in mind that juggling returns almost 7 million results, and you will see that it is possible that you are indexed, but not in the first 50 results. Or even not the first 5000!

Method 2 of 2: Get Indexed

1. 1 Make connections. Search engines use spiders to crawl through existing links in search of new ones. There are several ways to get a spider to weave a web for your website.
   • If you already have a blog or other indexed website, link to your new site and do not delete it. Make a big and bold link. You want people to see it, click on it, and visit your site!
   • Ask someone with an index site to link to your site. It can be as simple as an embedded link or your product ad. The more people connect with your site the better, so feel free if you want to promote it yourself.
   • Add your site to popular social bookmarks on Digg and StumbleUpon.
   • Add your site to the Open Directory Project (ODP Open Directory) network. (See how the Open Directory Project is showing in blue? Here is a link to dmoz.org, the OPC site). The OCR is a multilingual open source link content directory that is revised and maintained by volunteer editors.
   • Include a link to your new site on your Facebook page and Twitter profile. In fact, you can put a link on every site. Not only will this provide you with quick indexing, it will help you raise your search rankings, as well as what is called search engine optimization.