2.2 Invite robots to your site

1) Submit your site to Search Engines

Yes, let's send each Search Engine's spider a personal invitation to visit your site.

Baby-simple: go to the Search Engine that's important to you, and type in "add URL to name_of_the_search_engine", follow the link you see, enter the necessary data and thus submit your website to this Search Engine

Note! Search Engines don't expect you to submit all your webpages (just think of some forums that have a few thousand pages — the owner would go crazy submitting them!). All you have to do is submit your homepage.

Want an example? Here we go with Google!

If you type in a search query "add URL to Google" you'll get the following options:

• 1) adding a page via Webmaster Tools (if you have access to it) and
• 2) adding a page via http://www.google.com/submityourcontent/website-owner/ (if you want to add a page of a website you don't necessarily own)

To add a page via your Webmaster Tools account, see detailed instructions at http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1352276.

If you choose to proceed with the second option, after you land on the page http://www.google.com/submityourcontent/website-owner/, choose "Add your URL", enter a URL you want to be indexed, type in CAPTCHA and submit the request. Easy, isn't it?

Add URL to Google

Here's another example of submitting your website page to Bing
After you type in "add URL to bing" in a Search Engine, the first result you'll see will direct you to the page http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html

Submit URL to Bing

Here you have to enter your website's URL alongside CAPTCHA.

Click Submit — and that's it.
Submit your site to all Search Engines that you think are important, and the crawler will come to your site to look at it.

If there's a special local Search Engine in your country, like Yandex in Russia, or Seznam in Czech Republic, it's also important to submit your website there.

It won't take much of your time to submit to Search Engines, but it may take quite a long time till the crawler visits your site. In my practice, it took up to 6 weeks. And, it also depends on the Search Engine.

For this reason, here's another thing I believe you should do:

2) Put a FAT link to your website

Quite logically: if the Google spider loves some web page and visits it quite often, and that page has a link to your site, then this Google crawler will be happy to follow the link and look at your site, too. Same thing about other Search Engines.

So here's what I'm driving at: try to get a link from some respected web page with a good Page Rank (preferably 4 and above).

DO IT NOW! Submit your website to Search Engines, or put a good link to your site, or better do both.

Problem 2: Your site is hard for Search Engines to crawl

Note! A situation of the kind is quite common, and this problem may cause both a) no results at all and b) & d) incorrect number of results

Moreover, even if the site:your_domain_name query brings correct results, the problem may still exist, therefore going through what I say next is a must!

So... another problem that could occur: the Search Engine knows about your site, but the spider simply cannot crawl through it, as it's too inconvenient and search–engine–not–friendly. Well, this takes some more effort to solve, but no worries! The guide is here to help

And, what I talk about further makes a big plus to know, even if your site is found by Search Engines. So look through the points below anyway, and do all I recommend. Even if you think your site is totally OK, I'm sure you'll find things to improve.

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