Adding your site to google

[chas100]

How do you add your site to the google search engine? Is it done by thme automatically, or is there a registration process?

Kind regards,

[Plotloss]

www.google.com/intl/en/submit_content.html

[chas100]

Cheers Matt!

[mc_blue]

It will sit in the Sand Box for a while before being indexed.

[aspender]

Read up on robots.txt, 301 redirect and sitemaps. There's a lot of useful info on the Google Webmaster Tools site.

[slapmatt]

Firstly, you DON'T need to manually submit your sites to search engines. They will find your site by following links on other sites to yours. Despite most search engines having an "Add Site" function, there is anecdotal evidence with Google at least to suggest that the waiting list on these functions are soooo long as to render them useless.

To find out if your site is indexed by a search engine, simply type in this query:

site:www.yourdomain.com

This will return all the pages on your site that are indexed. This query works on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

If you find your site isn't very well indexed there are plenty of things you can do for free. Create an XML sitemap of your site using a free XML sitemap tool such as this one. You can then [url]log into Google|https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/si[/url], claim your site and upload the sitemap to help Google index all your pages. Yahoo are also rolling out several Webmaster tools which I've only just started using, but they look similar to Google.

Get some quality links to your site that the search engines will follow. If your site has an RSS feed, submit that feed to sites like FeedBurner.com and Feedster.com. Submit a "story" to news sites like Digg.com and Reddit.net. The search engines love these kinds of sites and will follow the links to your site and index it well.

The other thing to check if your site is not very well indexed is that you are not using fancy JavaScript menu systems or other kinds of links that SEs might have problems with following.