We all know how it feels…
You’ve been working on your new website forever and it’s finally ready to launch. You are uploading everything to your host and there is your brand new website live on the internet. Now that it’s up there you want people to find it.
Nothing is worse than having your friends call you because they could not see your site in Google, Yahoo or Bing even when they were typing the URL in the search field.
But how do you get your new site indexed fast, so it shows up in the search engines pronto?
Here are 6 tips that can help you to achieve just that. You can pick your favorite one or just do them all to ensure your site will be noticed by the search engines.
1. Submit your site
Yes you can still submit your site to the search engines and NO it doesn’t cost you a dime. This tactic might not get you indexed the fastest these days, but it surely can’t hurt. Here is where you submit to the top 3 search engines:
http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx
2. Register your site with search engines
The top 3 search engines all offer the feature to register your site, by placing some code into your site or on your server. They also provide you with a great deal of information about your site, relevant keywords and problems they encounter. You can also submit a xml sitemap to all the search engines, which I highly recommend.
Here are the links where you can sign up for webmaster accounts to register your site(s):
www.google.com/webmasters/tools
3. Ping your site
Pinging has become popular with blogs. This is a way blogs notify the search engines about new content on their site. Pinging can also help to get your site indexed, since you can ping anything you want (doesn’t need to be a blog) and it only takes a minute to do. Pinging will let the search engines know that there is something new to look at.
Here is a great ping service we use. Just add your site and click “Send Pings”: pingomatic.com
4. Social Bookmark it
Social bookmarking sites are spidered by search engines all day long, since they have a lot of new content and are updated constantly. This can be very helpful when you want to get your site indexed, since you can just leverage the power of the social bookmarking sites. Bookmarking your site with the most popular services should help you to get noticed by Google and friends fast. Here are the bookmarking sites we recommend for this:
5. Link to your new site
If you have an existing site that has been around for a while and has been indexed by Google you can just add a link from that site to your new site and the search engines will follow that link to find your site. You can also ask a friend that has an established website to link to yours.
If the website that links to you is an active blog this can help as well, since search engines expect to find new content on blogs that are updated on a regular basis and come by to visit more often. If you have a profile on Facebook and Twitter post your link on here as well. The more links you have into your news sites the quicker search engines will notice it.
6. Publish an online press release
Finally you can also publish an online press release to get some attention. The advantage here is that you will get search engines as well as visitors to your website this way. The disadvantage is that most press release services charge for publishing your release and you also need to write it first. If you are planning a big launch make sure to have your release ready, so it can be published the day you launch your new site.
So there you have 6 different ways to get your new site indexed fast. I have seen new sites being index in Google in a matter of hours and if you follow the tips you shouldn’t have any problems getting your new site indexed. Note that Google is usually faster than Yahoo and Bing here. It might take you a little longer to get indexed with Yahoo and Bing, even if you follow these steps, so be a little patient.
How do you find out if your site is indexed?
Well, just go to your search engine of choice and type your url www.mysite.com into the search box and see if you come up. You can use the following command in the search field to see how many pages on your site have been indexed already (Hint: a xml sitemap can help a lot here):
site:www.mysite.com
If you site shows up you have officially been indexed! 
Do you still have any problems with getting your site indexed? Feel free to contact us and we’ll be happy to help.
Tags: new website indexed, search engine submission, website indexing, website submission
