How to get your site into search engines

So you have your website up and ready, but you don't have any traffic yet. For most sites, search engines are the primary source of traffic, so it's important to let the search engines know that your website exists.

Even if you don't do anything, over time your website will probably get listed on its own. Search engine spiders are constantly crawling the web and will eventually reach your site, but not only does this take a lot of time, it's also unlikely that you'll get a high enough position in the search engine to show up in the first few pages of search results. For this reason, if search engine traffic is important to your site, there are ways you can actively get your site listed and ranking well in search engines to dramatically increase your traffic.

Do note that search engine ranking is not dependent on the server you are on, who is hosting your site, or whether you have a dedicated IP address. InMotion Hosting also does not control how search engines rank your site, as search engines are run by third parties that follow their own policies. If you would like InMotion Hosting to design and optimize your site for search engines, please contact our Managed Internet Presence department for more information.

First, do some research on how search engines work. There are hundreds of reliable articles online that offer tips on search engine optimization. To get started:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-seo3.html

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291

You should start by adding your site to search engines manually instead of waiting for them to look for you. The site below will allow you to add your site to many search engines at one time:

http://www.addme.com/

For CMS users (Joomla, Wordpress, etc), use "search engine friendly" (SEF) URLs. These reformat the URLs of your website so they are understandable by search engines. For example, below is how a CMS may format your URL:

http://yourdomain.com/index.php?page=45&option=something

A SEF URL would look like this:

http://yourdomain.com/45/something

These are easier for search engines to read, making it easier for them to index your site. Most CMS's will have a SEF extension or plugin that can do this for you.

What else should you do?

1. Create a sitemap! Sitemaps are mainly used by Yahoo and Google to index your site:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40318

If you are using a CMS, your CMS may have a third-party sitemap extension.

2. Use meta tags:

http://www.highrankings.com/metakeyword