How To Get Listed In The Search Engines
A friend of mine recently started working on his own web site. But he isn't listed in the search engines yet. How do you get listed in the search engines? I recommend two ways.
First, if you don't already have a web site, your best bet may not be to register a domain from scratch. If you go to SnapNames you can bid on expiring domains. The value there is that expiring domains have some history. In my study of top ranked web sites (which I will go into detail on in a later post), it's clear that the majority of sites ranked in Google are a year old or older. That is, they were registered last year, or in '04, '99, etc. However, you can get ranked in Yahoo and MSN with a fresh (newly registered) domain name. Here's how.
My assumption here is that you already have a web site setup and you have FTP access to your web site.
1. Go to www.blogger.com. If you have a username, sign in. If you don't, then sign up for a new account.
2. Create a blog.
3. Click on "Advanced Blog Setup" near the bottom. Enter the details for your server. The examples provided are usually pretty close for most servers.
4. Go to Settings | Archiving. Set the Archive Frequency to Daily. Click on Save Settings at the bottom. The reason to do this is that archiving every day causes a page to be split off from the front page of your blog every day, which provides more content for the search engines to index.
5. Go to Settings | Site Feed. Make sure Publish Site Feed is set to Yes. Fill in the various fields. The site feed URL is the full URL of your site feed, such as http://www.vcmba.com/weblog/atom.xml . You can leave Article Footer blank. Click Save Settings. Make a note of this site feed URL, you'll use it in the steps below.
6. Try creating a new blog entry. Go to Posting | Create. Enter a short post such as "Welcome to my blog. In the coming months I'll be telling you about how to quit your job and make lots of money on the Internet." Publish the Post. You may have to mess with the FTP settings and paths until you have things configured just right for your server. These settings are under Settings | Publishing.
7. Go to my.yahoo.com. Click on "Add Content", which is on the left-hand side, about half way down. If you have a Yahoo account, sign in. If you don't, create one.
8. In the FIND - Find Content box, on the right-hand side, click on Add RSS by URL.
9. In the URL box, enter the URL of your site feed from above. Then click Add. Sometimes you have to click back and do this a few times until Yahoo picks it up.
10. Now your blog feed is included on your My Yahoo page, which will cause your blog to get indexed by the search engines (at least by Yahoo and MSN).
The key is to keep adding more content to your blog on a regular basis. Regular means ideally every day.
If you follow the above steps, you should see your site get listed in at least Yahoo and MSN within a few days to a week.
You can search in Yahoo and MSN by your site name, e.g. www.vcmba.com, to see if it is getting picked up. You can also look in your web logs to see if the search engines are crawling your site.
If you do this, you should look for things like:
Agent: YahooFeedSeeker/2.0 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0; MSIE 5.5; http://publisher.yahoo.com/rssguide; users 0; views 0)
Agent: exactseek-pagereaper-2.63 crawler@exactseek.com
Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)
Agent: msnbot/0.9 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
These are the search engines "bots" crawling your site.
Again, you need to create new content on a regular basis. The easiest way to do this when you're getting started is to post a blog entry every day.
Lastly, keep in mind that it takes longer to get listed in Google than in Yahoo or MSN.
First, if you don't already have a web site, your best bet may not be to register a domain from scratch. If you go to SnapNames you can bid on expiring domains. The value there is that expiring domains have some history. In my study of top ranked web sites (which I will go into detail on in a later post), it's clear that the majority of sites ranked in Google are a year old or older. That is, they were registered last year, or in '04, '99, etc. However, you can get ranked in Yahoo and MSN with a fresh (newly registered) domain name. Here's how.
My assumption here is that you already have a web site setup and you have FTP access to your web site.
1. Go to www.blogger.com. If you have a username, sign in. If you don't, then sign up for a new account.
2. Create a blog.
3. Click on "Advanced Blog Setup" near the bottom. Enter the details for your server. The examples provided are usually pretty close for most servers.
4. Go to Settings | Archiving. Set the Archive Frequency to Daily. Click on Save Settings at the bottom. The reason to do this is that archiving every day causes a page to be split off from the front page of your blog every day, which provides more content for the search engines to index.
5. Go to Settings | Site Feed. Make sure Publish Site Feed is set to Yes. Fill in the various fields. The site feed URL is the full URL of your site feed, such as http://www.vcmba.com/weblog/atom.xml . You can leave Article Footer blank. Click Save Settings. Make a note of this site feed URL, you'll use it in the steps below.
6. Try creating a new blog entry. Go to Posting | Create. Enter a short post such as "Welcome to my blog. In the coming months I'll be telling you about how to quit your job and make lots of money on the Internet." Publish the Post. You may have to mess with the FTP settings and paths until you have things configured just right for your server. These settings are under Settings | Publishing.
7. Go to my.yahoo.com. Click on "Add Content", which is on the left-hand side, about half way down. If you have a Yahoo account, sign in. If you don't, create one.
8. In the FIND - Find Content box, on the right-hand side, click on Add RSS by URL.
9. In the URL box, enter the URL of your site feed from above. Then click Add. Sometimes you have to click back and do this a few times until Yahoo picks it up.
10. Now your blog feed is included on your My Yahoo page, which will cause your blog to get indexed by the search engines (at least by Yahoo and MSN).
The key is to keep adding more content to your blog on a regular basis. Regular means ideally every day.
If you follow the above steps, you should see your site get listed in at least Yahoo and MSN within a few days to a week.
You can search in Yahoo and MSN by your site name, e.g. www.vcmba.com, to see if it is getting picked up. You can also look in your web logs to see if the search engines are crawling your site.
If you do this, you should look for things like:
Agent: YahooFeedSeeker/2.0 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0; MSIE 5.5; http://publisher.yahoo.com/rssguide; users 0; views 0)
Agent: exactseek-pagereaper-2.63 crawler@exactseek.com
Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)
Agent: msnbot/0.9 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
These are the search engines "bots" crawling your site.
Again, you need to create new content on a regular basis. The easiest way to do this when you're getting started is to post a blog entry every day.
Lastly, keep in mind that it takes longer to get listed in Google than in Yahoo or MSN.
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