Getting your web pages indexed quickly is something of the Holy Grail of a webmasters existence. A never ending quest with a fabulous reward attached to it. A high ranking in the search engines is something to be coveted, and can lead to many good things for you and your website or blog. But first things first: you need to get your pages indexed before they will begin to rank. Let’s look at some of the factors that go into getting web pages indexed, and how you can affect those.
Don’t Add It! - Google likes to find your pages naturally; that is, through a search. This flies in the face of their own service where you can add your URL directly into Google for consideration. My experience is that pages seem to rank better and faster when they are left for GoogleBot to discover.
Have An XML Sitemap – Having a current and functioning XML sitemap on your blog or site will make it easy for the search engines to find your site. And don’t think that Yahoo or Bing don’t make use of a Google XML sitemap: they do! While they may not digest all of it in one sitting, having your sitemap available is a best practice.
Utilize RSS Feeds – Make sure that your pages have RSS feeds, and that you know what to do with them. Making them available on your pages for your visitors is a great thing to do, while an even better idea is to submit your RSS feed URLs to the RSS feed aggregators for inclusion. There are more than 50 of these aggregators out there, and they are crawled several times a day by Google and Yahoo. Once this task is done, it does not have to be re-done. Your feed is in there forever (theoretically) . People have had pages indexed in hours using this method.
Get Some Good Backlinks – Acquire a few juicy backlinks to your site, particularly for your chosen keywords, and you will be found quickly. Links are the currency of the Web, and if sites are spending this currency on you… search engines notice! These links can come from article directories, web 2.0 site and other authoritative sites. This one requires very little work.
Get Some Social Love! - Get your site social bookmarked at some of the more popular social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, Mr. Wong, Mixx and several other popular sites. These sites are crawled by Google constantly, and links to your site will be found.
Ping Your Pages – A ping is little more than an electronic notification that a page is new (or updated) and is available for viewing by the engines. If you have a WordPress blog it has the ability to ping each post or page you create. (It is somewhat unreliable; be sure to check.) Another option is a few of the free ping services out there like Pingomatic, and Ping.FM
Use Sound Internal Linking Structure – This means that making sure the pages on your site link to each other in a sound fashion. This will go a long way to getting more of your site indexed, if the search engine robots can easily find the links on the page.
Using these few best practices will usually ensure that your web pages are indexed quickly and efficiently. You’ve done your part; now you want the world to see!
