2.2 Invite robots to your site

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1) Submit your site to Search Engines

Yes, let's send each Search Engine's spider a personal invitation to visit your site.

Baby-simple: go to the Search Engine that's important to you, and type in "add URL to name_of_the_search_engine", then follow the link you see, enter the necessary data and thus submit your website to this Search Engine.

Note! Search Engines don't expect you to submit all your webpages (just think of some forums that have a few thousand pages — the owner would go crazy submitting them!). All you have to do is submit your homepage.

Want an example? Here we go with Yahoo!.

I go to http://www.yahoo.com , type in add URL to Yahoo,

follow the necessary link ( http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html ) in the results page,

then choose to submit my website for free

Submit Website to Yahoo! for Free

and get to the page where I enter my website's URL.

Submit Your URL to Yahoo!

Click Submit URL — and that's it.

Submit your site to all Search Engines that you think are important, and the crawler will come to your site to look at it. What Search Engines are a must for you? First of all, these are: Google.com, Yahoo.com and MSN.com. For your convenience, here're the pages from which you start in these three:

• Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/
• Yahoo!: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
• MSN: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

If you expect clients to come from, say, Belgium or Germany, it's good to submit to their regional versions like Yahoo.de or Google.be. Also, if there's a special local Search Engine in your country, like Yandex in Russia, or Seznam in Czech Republic, it's also important to you.

Note! It won't take much of your time to submit to search engines, but it may take quite a long time till the crawler visits your site. In my practice, it took up to 6 weeks. And, it also depends on the Search Engine.

For instance, the elder of my sons Mike launched his personal website 16 days ago, and it got indexed by Google the day before yesterday, but he's still waiting for Yahoo!'s crawler to come.

For this reason, here's another thing I believe you should do:

2) Put a FAT link to your website

Quite logically: if the Google spider loves some web page and visits it quite often, and that page has a link to your site, then this Google crawler will be happy to follow the link and look at your site, too. Same thing about other Search Engines.

So here's what I'm driving at: try to get a link from some respected web page with a good Page Rank (preferably 4 and above).

DO IT NOW! Submit your website to search engines, or put a good link to your site, or do both.

Problem 2: Your site is hard for Search Engines to crawl

Note! A situation of the kind is quite common, and this problem may cause both a) no results at all and b)&d) incorrect number of results

Moreover, even if the site:your_domain_name query brings correct results, the problem may still exist, therefore going through what I say next is a must!

So... another problem that could occur: the Search Engine knows about your site, but the spider simply cannot crawl through it, as it's too inconvenient and search-engine-not-friendly. Well, this takes some more effort to solve, but no worries! The guide is here to help.

And, what I talk about further makes a big plus to know, even if your site is found by Search Engines. So look through the points below anyway, and do all I recommend. Even if you think your site is totally OK, I'm sure you'll find things to improve.

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