Listing your website with Google

 

Author: Spencer J Casey


Sun, 07 Jun 2009 12:00:00 CST – A common question is “how do I get my website listed on Google?” Google offers web publishers several easy-to-use tools to help you share your website with others via search. The process of submitting your website is free and relatively easy. The key to a successful submission is designing and organizing your website content and Meta tags to clearly and accurately describe your website. In this article, I will highlight how to organize and submit your website to be indexed and ranked on the world’s most popular search engine.


Prior to submitting your website for listing it is extremely important to consider some basic web development principals. To begin with, it is critical to formulate a “site plan” of your website, outlining the hierarchy, structure, and overall content. Similar to an organizational chart, a good web developer will want to partition and sub-divide the information on your site into meaningful segments. The text on each page should be concise and accurately describe the products, services, or theme of the page.   Why? When a Googlebot indexes your website, it evaluates the text on all pages. As the bot crawls each respective page it indexes and ranks keywords within the website. These words and phrases help define your website, and assist Google with indexing and/or placing your website for search requests. Therefore, it is essential to have relevant and concise content in order to improve your overall Google ranking.

 
Another important step during development is to index each page with Meta tags. Meta tags are another great way to help assist Google accurately index your pages. Meta tags are placed in the HTML header section of each page; the code is hidden and is not visible to web users. Within the Meta tags a web developer should define the title of each page and provide a brief description of the contents. The title and description should accurately reflect the actual information on the page. In most cases, the title and description you provide in the Meta tag will be what Google references when indexing your website during a search query. For instance, this is how I defined the Meta tags on www.caseydesigns.com.


<head>
<Meta Name="Description" Content ="Provides Web Hosting, Development, Advanced E-mail Services, Marketing Solutions, and Domains. ">
<title>Casey Designs – Web Hosting and Development</title>
</head>

When you search www.google.com for “Casey Designs”, my homepage is listed exactly the same as my Meta Tags. With that in mind, well planned Meta tag information will help define or craft your search listing.
At this point, you should be ready to add your URL to Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/.

 
Finally, it is important to submit your website to other search engines, web directories, blogs, feeds, industry specific listings, and reference websites. An important aspect of Google’s page/web ranking system is how well your site is indexed and linked with other webs. Most search engines have similar systems for adding your URL to their search index. Search the web for URL submission on yahoo.com, bing.com, aol.com, etc. Google also has a website dedicated to assisting with indexing and monitoring your sites search queries, errors, keywords, etc. Consider signing up for a Google Webmaster Tool account, ( https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/siteoverview).


 

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