Introducing Your Website to Google

Five Simple Steps

As a website owner, you have built a clean user friendly website selling products or services with great navigation and useful content. Then you wait for the traffic to trickle in from the search engines. Many a time, it does not happen and leaves the owner disillusioned. There are five simple ways you can use to introduce your website to Google.

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Netconcepts is an Auckland search engine optimisation and search marketing consultancy with 10 years experience and impressive results in the New Zealand search industry since 1999. The company has developed cutting edge tools in the realms of seo like Wordpress plugins. In ecommerce web development, it has developed products like Gravity Stream and Gravity Matter ...

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If your website does not appear in the Google index once your site goes live, there are five simple methods of introducing your site to Google. This helps the spiders (Googlebot) crawl your site and Google then places your site in its index.

Create a sitemap
The easiest way to do this is to have a Google Webmasters account. If you are the site owner, you can go to www.google.com/webmasters and register for the free service. Once inside, you can generate a sitemap easily with the help of instructions provided and submit the sitemap. The sitemap is an XML file with links to various areas of your site.

The Webmasters interface helps site owners understand their site better and they can unearth crawling errors, get a good idea of the keywords used by searchers to find their site and links from external sites pointing to their site.

Backlinks
The major problem with many new sites is that they remain insulated on the web. Such sites have no links to other external sites. They do not have any links coming into them. The crawlers do not even know that such sites exist.

The best way to solve this problem is to submit to local directories. For a site that is New Zealand based, it would be ideal to submit for free to NZS.com. The spiders crawl such directories regularly and are sure to find your site listing there and follow the link. You can find a good list of other free New Zealand directories.

It is good to bear in mind that Google gives more value to a site that it finds in its crawl through links on other sites than you submitting your site at their Submit Your Site at www.google.com/addurl/

Top Quality Content
Creating great content is not easy. If the content on your site is unique and valuable to readers and explains to them the benefits of your product/service, the search engines will also recognise it and reward your site with good rankings.

Good quality content converts casual visitors to your site into customers. It also helps your site gain links naturally from other sites who reference your work. The latter is called editorial links and Google gives it a lot of value. Every link from an external site to yours is counted as a vote by Google from unbiased external sources. The more the backlinks to your site, Google factors it favourably in its ranking algorithm.

Do not hesitate to link to the top authority sites in your industry. There are misconceptions that you would leak pagerank by linking excessively to other sites. Linking to good sites improves the good neighbourhood aspects of your site linkage and it is beneficial in the long run.

Start Blogging
Whatever be the size of your business or the industry you operate in, however restricted your geographical targeting is, a blog can do wonders for your business online. If you can transfer your passion for your service or product into your blog posts, you are on a winning track.

Google loves informational sources and a blog is exactly that. You can talk about the latest developments in your industry. Over time, you will become an authoritative figure in your industry with a loyal following whose trust you would have gained by sharing good quality information on your blog.

Wordpress is a fantastic free tool that is the best blogging software in the cyberworld. Every time you publish a post on your blog, it pings the search engine bots and this brings them crawling to your site (literally!) If you are serious about your business, it would be worth investing in a domain and hosting the Wordpress blog on your domain. It also establishes credibility in the eyes of the users.

Judicious Use of Social Media
Get involved in hot social media properties like Facebook and Twitter. The secret to success is to network with like minded people and build relationships. Enrich conversations by giving useful tips and advice and position yourself as a leader in your field. Develop a following and avoid hype at all costs. Do not promote your service/product blatantly. You not only build friends who in turn would refer you to others, you also build backlinks to your site when you offer useful information. The rewards in the long term are worth your efforts.

Credit:
Ravi Venkatesan
Senior SEO Consultant
Netconcepts - Auckland SEO Specialists

Search Engine Optimisation images from Flickr: google, Transparent Screen and Mac + Starbucks.