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2.2 Invite robots to your site

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", 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 Google!

If you type in a search query "add URL to Google" you'll get the following options:

To add a page via your Webmaster Tools account, see detailed instructions at http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1352276.

If you choose to proceed with the second option, after you land on the page http://www.google.com/submityourcontent/website-owner/, choose "Add your URL", enter a URL you want to be indexed, type in CAPTCHA and submit the request. Easy, isn't it?

Add URL to Google
Add URL to Google

Here's another example of submitting your website page to Bing
After you type in "add URL to bing" in a Search Engine, the first result you'll see will direct you to the page http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html

Submit URL to Bing
Submit URL to Bing

Here you have to enter your website's URL alongside CAPTCHA.

Click Submit — 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.

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 submit your website there.

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 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 better 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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#1548 2010-09-12 09:37:37 Quang Cao Google

Thanks for your guide.

Answer
#1463 2010-09-01 18:19:35 Ivo Ignatov

Hi folks

What is the best way to get FAT link?

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#1471 2010-09-02 06:58:52 Dan Richmond

You can learn about that here: http://www.seoinpractice.com/where-link-building-starts.html

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#1438 2010-08-29 01:54:02 oochie garcia

hi dan,

i created my site using wix.com but i redirected the url using cjb.net

the original name of the site is: http://www.wix.com/oochiebabe/captureandprint

now the name is http://www.captureandprint.cjb.net

so, now which site name should i submit to the search engines?

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#1443 2010-08-31 05:37:45 Dan Richmond

Right now the is a frame on your new site, that points to the old site, this is not really a redirect. The older site will be analyzed by the search engines in any case. You might want to set up a 301 redirect on the old URL to the new domain and then concentrate on building links to the new domain.

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#1637 2010-10-27 19:04:25 GARY BRYANT

Hi Dan,

I'm confused about this, too. I created my very first site with GoogleSites, and the original domain name was something like: https://sites.google.com/myorignaldomainurl.com. I did't know about SEO, so the site just sat there with basically zero traffic. Now I go to GoDaddy and purchase a "custom" domain name URL, http://mynewdomainurl.com. I want to do SEO and build traffic on the new URL home and corresponding pages. GoDaddy tells me first that I need to "point and mask" the original domain to the new name, and every page did not change. They were all, http://mynewdomainurl.com. That wasn't right. Then GoDaddy tells me to "map/point" my new URL to ghs.google.com, which is the Google Servers were my original content and URL are hosted. Very confusing to a newbie. Then, with GoDaddy's help, they created an @A record or CNAME or something, and all the old pages correctly substitute the original Sites URL's to the new GoDaddy URL's. Yippie. But now for the SEO question: Should I do this 301 deal from the old URL's to the custom URL's? How do do this, it's all very confusing? Google help takes a very long time, and the answers are confusing. I would appreciate your expertise on this question.

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#1456 2010-08-31 18:18:32 oochie garcia

i'm sorry i got confused

Answer
#1427 2010-08-20 16:07:47 mOxby Design

Link building lessons - that I'll be interested in. We do it, definitely, but getting ones in our industry is hard work, really hard work :-) But one step at a time. I'm liking the writing style here. Thanks again.

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#938 2010-01-06 11:51:19 Paul Watchorn

Thats interesting, thanks Dan

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#924 2010-01-05 06:05:21 Dan Richmond

@Paul Watchorn

Not exactly. A FAT link is the name given to a link from a page that has a lot of visitors, top rankings for some good keywords and most importantly is often visited by search engines' crawlers.

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#894 2009-12-30 04:35:59 Paul Watchorn

So a 'FAT' link is simply the name given to a link from a page that has a good page rank?

Thanks

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#834 2009-12-13 02:01:07 Ken Taylor

@Dan

I got it now. Thanks. For some reason I was thinking about Ranking. But this lesson was all about getting my site indexed (I like to think "listed" in "Google's Big Book of Websites"--if, for example, I'm want to get indexed with Google)

I love imagery. Thanks again Don.

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#820 2009-12-09 08:20:27 Dan Richmond

@ Ken Taylor

I am not sure that this is the case... Your goal here is simply to get indexed. You don't even have to submit several pages of your website (or get fat links to all pages for the same indexing purpose) - the homepage is enough. Once you're indexed you won't need to repeat the procedure.

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#805 2009-12-07 21:17:56 Ken Taylor

Thank you for the Search Engine's submission links. I'm kind of from the old school. If I can submit to the SE's and use a FAT link, I'm going to do all that I can.

Why?

Because things are always changing. SE's are getting better. I like getting into making it a habit of thinking about SEO that:

"More is better and too much is not enough!" (think Backlinks)

"Less is more!" (She was wearing a to-just-above-the-knee dress with a low neck collar)



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