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How to get your site indexed in Google and Yahoo
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
When you've got a wonderful website, you want the world to see it! Submitting to Google, Yahoo and MSN means that your site will show up in the listings at some point, but how do you tell the search engines which pages to list?
Firstly, use robots.txt - this states which parts of your website you DO NOT want to share. You can also use the robots meta tag in your web pages, but not all engines use this yet. For more information, see www.robotstxt.org/ and www.searchengineworld.com/robots/robots_tutorial.htm.
Secondly, create a sitemap, which links to all of your pages and link to this from your index page. You don't have to just list all the links - it is for your visitors benefit too. For an example, see our sitemap at www.littlefishwebdesign.com/sitemap.htm.
Finally, create a Google and Yahoo sitemap, for the search engines benefit. You will need to create a Google Sitemap account (http://google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/) and Yahoo account (http://edit.europe.yahoo.com/config/eval_register?.intl=uk&new=1) to be able to submit your sitemaps. To create a Google Sitemap, I thoroughly recommend SOFTplus GSiteCrawler found at http://johannesmueller.com/gs/. There is a settings wizard, which walks you through the whole process and you can even choose for your completed sitemap to be uploaded to your website, and Google to be alerted.
The "URL list for export" function of GSiteCrawler means that you can then generate a text-only list of all your site's pages, ready to upload to Yahoo. This is a slightly more manual task than the Google Sitemap, but still a fantastic time-saving tool, as you don't have to type out each of your pages into a list. To submit your sitemap to Yahoo, upload the file to your website and then go to http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request and fill in the location of your sitemap file.
Of course, there are no guarantees that Google and Yahoo will index all your pages, or rank your site as highly as you would like, but at least using the sitemap method, you are giving your hard work a fighting chance to get noticed.
Labels: linking, resources, searchengines, webdesign
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