For those of you who are beginners, the first question you mights want to consider is, what is SEO? According to the dictionary definition, SEO refers to “The process of maximizing the number of visitors to a Web site by ensuring that the site remains high on the list of results returned by a search engine”.

How to get your website indexed by search engines?

In other words, SEO is just a fancy word for bunch of things that can make a website more or less important in a Search Engine’s (such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc) eyes and as a web master, you want your website to be the most important.

However, the first step in SEO requires you to actually get your website indexed or submitted into the search engines; because you can’t have rankings in something you are not a part of and that is what this article is going to be about.

Submitting Your Website to Search Engines

Before submitting your website to search engines, make sure that your web site has been optimized for indexing. (If you would like to see an article on optimizing, place in the comment section below.) Submitting your website to the search can be a very simple process.

Don’t be fooled by the many services that promise to submit your site to hundreds or even thousands of search engines or guarantee placement with different search engines. These services do not necessary mean that your site will be successful; to be honest, it’s possible that your money can be spent in better ways. On the other hand, if you don’t have time to submit your site, this may be a good option for your company. Just make sure you use a reputable company.

Take preventive measures before you write the check or let someone charge your card. Companies have been charge with spamming. And once your website/domain has been labeled for spamming, this can cause your site to be blocked or banned from the search engines. This is a not a title you want, trust me!

Although there are said to be close to 4000 search engines out there, the top four or five — Google, Yahoo, Bing, and AOL — are responsible for the majority of the traffic. So, this is the obvious place to start.

In order to submit your site to Google, go here and enter your site’s URL. Search Engine such as Google has powerful spider engine that will crawl your entire website, this way you need to submit your website only once. Submitting multiple times does not get you in any faster nor does it get you listed any higher.

Yahoo submission process is simple also, visit their submission page and enter your information. Keep in mind there is no guarantee that your site will be listed after you have submitted your link. It is up to their discretion.

Click here to submit your site to Bing. AOL’s search is powered by Google, so submission to Google will be inclusive to AOL searches.

As I allude to above there are thousands of engine out there, and you are welcome to drill down to second-tier engines such as Ask, Lycos, and Excite. But, truth be told, the most effective are the major four listed above.

With the popularity of Social Networking such as FaceBook, and Twitter, and too many others to name, it is wise to get your website as much exposure as you possibly can. This can also help with search engine ranking; you see the more sites that your site is on, the higher possible ranking you will achieve in the four major search engines.

Google has been indexing PDF files – a stalwart of the myriad content forms accessible on the web – since 2001, and by our very rough estimate there are over 500 million PDFs currently indexed by the search engine. 

There remains quite a bit of confusion surrounding the use of PDFs in the relation to ranking on search engines, but Google has showed a quick glance at its cards, clearing up at least some confusion today in a post about the format in search results. If you’re responsible for website promotion and driving traffic to its pages, pay close attention:

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I think this is a really informative article, especially if you are trying like everyone else to get your site listed higher in the search engines. It is small things like this that always takes you over your competitors.

In great news, Google, Yahoo and MSN have agreed upon a XML sitemap standard.

What’s this mean to you? Well, you just need to create one XML sitemap and you can submit it to all three engines. I’ve been doing that for a while and didn’t seem to have any problem but now it’s official.

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Most of these tips are Sullivan’s, rephrased and with summaries of observations from me and from other camp participants included.

1) Use Google AdWords’ keyword tool to find the most popular keywords related to your website and your beat

Before you begin tuning your specific key words and phrases, you need to discover what key words and phrases Internet readers are using in search engines to find content like yours’. Google’s various keyword tools can help you do that. The AdWords tool will show you the approximate number of searches conducted on Google for words and phrases that you enter, or for phrases associated with a URL of your choosing.

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