Starting an Online Business All-in-One For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Submitting Your Site to Search Engines

Don't wait for other people to reference your Web site. The most straightforward way to make search engines notice your site is for you to tell them directly. Years ago, in the search engine submission process, Web site owners could file reports containing information about their sites and the URLs and content used on their sites. Although most of this information gathering is now done by the search engines' automatic programs, called spiders (because they crawl around the Internet looking for information), some search engines still allow you to submit your site.

Signing up with Google

Google sends its own programs, known as Googlebots, around the Web looking for new sites to add to its index. There's no reason, however, that you should wait around and hope that a Googlebot will magically land on your Web site, especially when you're just starting out. Google maintains a simple, one-page Web form that you can fill out to identify your site for its software programs to analyze.

You can identify yourself to Google by following these steps:

1. Go to www.google.com/addurl.html.

   Google's Add Your URL to Google page opens, shown in Figure 6-1.

2. In the URL text box, enter the full address of your Web site's home page.

   Don't forget to add the http://. You don't need to include the home page name unless it's not index.html, index.htm, or default.html.

3. In the Comments box, enter a one-sentence keyword description of your Web site.

   Don't jam the box with ...