A question I often hear is “How can I get my website indexed by the search engines?”. This is not a silly question because let’s face the facts, if your Website is not even found by Google, Yahoo, and Bing, then it won’t be able to rank.

When you launch a website you should aim to get it crawled and indexed as soon as possible so that you can begin to build rank. But how can you do this if you don’t know how? Lucky You, that’s what this lesson is all about. After reading these website indexing tips and tricks you will be able to get your site indexed extremely fast!

Tip 1 – Setup an XML Sitemap

Search engines have suggested many times that their spiders are able to navigate, read and therefore index the contents of xml sitemaps faster and with less errors than anything else. It’s easy to setup and gives spiders what they want. Use it!

For static sites, here is a free tool that will generate the sitemap in the correct format for you.

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com

Once you have the sitemap.xml file, open with a text editor such as Notepad or TextEdit to ensure that all links have been added. Then upload to the site’s root directory.

For WordPress based sites, it’s even easier. Simply install the plugin, configure and hit the build button. The benefit of this is that the sitemap file will update every time you add a new post or page.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator

Tip 2 – Use Webmaster Tools

I’ll admit that I’m not always the biggest fan of Google, but as you are trying to cash in on that valuable traffic it’s extremely helpful if not absolutely necessary to use the free website tools provided by the monster traffic gods themselves.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools

Add your site and then submit your XML sitemap from step 1.

Do the same for Bing.

http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster

Tip 3 – Ping Your Site

Here are four free places that you can ping your site. This will almost immediately bring in a flood of spider activity which in turn will help get your website indexed as soon as possible. Use both to ping a huge number of services.

http://pingler.com
http://pingomatic.com
http://ping.in
http://www.pingoat.com

It’s as simple as entering the site info and pressing “Ping”.

Tip 4 – Get Some Free Backlinks

Don’t share this tactic with your competitors! Here is a secret that not many marketers may know about that will help get your website indexed and ranked at an accelerated speed.

http://howismysite.com will generate a few free back links for your site. Simply enter your domain name into the box and click on “check now”. Once you have done that, follow the remaining quick and easy steps and watch as your website enters the search engines.

Tip 5 – Use Twitter

Twitter has huge amounts of traffic and is constantly crawled by the search engines. So it’s a good idea to get your website noticed and followed by using this high powered authority site.

To do this all you need to do is go to http://twitter.com, set up a twitter profile, add a link to your website in the profile and follow some people who are in your market.

This is not a course on Twitter, but generally if you follow relevant people (not spam the crap out of random people) you will gain a few followers that will help to get some traffic back to your Twitter profile and get it crawled. Make sure you send out a few tweets. After you have a few followers, tweet about your new website including the link.

This will help get some much needed spider action moving in the direction of your site which will dramatically increase the chances of your website getting indexed fast.

Tip 6 – Digg It

http://Digg.com is another high authority, high traffic website that is constantly spidered. All you need to do is sign up for an account and submit your story which will be your website. Easy!

Getting your website indexed by the search engines does not need to be something difficult or next to impossible. Use these tips every time you launch a website to get it spidered quickly so that you can move on to bigger and better things!