When will my Website be Listed in the Search Engines?

Whenever we build and design new websites our customers often ask us how long it will take until their new website is listed in the search engines. Getting listed is known as getting “indexed” -- just like an index in a book. Of course when you have a new website, especially if it’s your first one, you are eager to start seeing some traffic from the search engines…and often times get frustrated when your website doesn’t get indexed right away. Keep in mind that the search engines perform scheduled scans of the Internet to find new and interesting websites to include in their listings. If yours doesn’t get listed right away there’s no need to panic because there are a couple things that you can do yourself to expedite the process.

SUBMIT YOUR WEBSITE TO THE SEARCH ENGINES
All search engines have different policies when it comes to adding websites to their indexes. Some search engines allow you to manually submit a request for inclusion, while others require you to wait until their “spiders” have “crawled” your website.

If you have a completely new website and would like to be included in Google’s or Yahoo!’s index without waiting for their spiders to crawl your website, you can visit these links, http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl / http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html, and manually add it yourself. However, there are sometimes long waiting periods until you are finally listed…it could take anywhere from 4-6 weeks until Google or Yahoo! updates their index with your search listing. There is also no guarantee that your website will get listed.

CREATE GOOGLE WEBMASTER ACCOUNT
Google Webmaster is a good tool to use in keeping track of the technical aspects of your website -- and best of all, it’s free! This is a great tool when it comes to letting Google know what pages your website has, and how many pages your website has. You can assure that all of your webpages on your website get properly indexed into Google by submitting a Google Sitemap.

To get started, you need a Google Account. If you don’t have one, you can sign up here. Once your Google Account has been created, you can activate your Webmaster account here: http://www.google.com/webmasters.

For some of you, you might need a little help from a programmer to install a verification code onto your website. This is to ensure that you have the authority to maintain the account linked with the website.

Once you have set up verification, you can then create a free Google Sitemap here: http://gsitecrawler.com/. Once you have created this, you must name it "sitemap.xml" and FTP it to your index file.

Once uploaded, you then need to go back to Google Webmaster Tools and submit the newly created sitemap to Google. Google will scan this on a regular basis and ensure that all of the pages you want indexed, are indexed.