SoloSEO

7 Steps to Get Your New Site Indexed in 24 hours

Posted by Michael D Jensen on November 26th, 2007

Most SEO’s will advise you to buy an existing site/domain (lots of age benefit), but there are times when you need to start from scratch with a fresh domain. It can sometimes take a couple of weeks to get a new domain indexed by Google (even longer to start ranking!). In order to speed up the process of getting your site indexed quickly, even in 24 hours, follow the steps outlined below:

1) Create 5 pages of content
Skip the “under construction” page and write several pages of real content, at least a few paragraphs.

2) Create Internal Links to your Pages
Put the content in a template with a menu structure to make this step easier. You can find free templates at oswd.org and other places, at least to get started. Link to the content through the menu, and if you have a major landing page, link to it from the content of a page or two.

3) Tag on Social Bookmarking Sites
After just a few minutes to create an account with these sites you can submit a link to your site. This gives you an instant way for Google and other search engines to find your site because these social bookmarking sites get visited by the search engine bots (like the Googlebot) quite regularly. A few bookmarking sites to recommend: Del.icio.us, BlinkList, StumbleUpon.com, and Furl. Make sure you tag them with common words, like those you find on their tag clouds (BlinkList has a good one, just scroll down on the page to see it).

4) Comment on popular and recent blogs (with your link)
Find 5 blogs that are fairly popular, relevant to your site, and have a recent blog post (last day or two). Read the post and add a comment that contributes to the discussion, including a link to your site in the URL field.

5) Create, Submit, and Ping your XML Sitemap
You can create a free XML sitemap here then upload the file to your site (just save it as sitemap.xml). Then ping Google with your sitemap by typing in the following URL in your browser, replacing the domain name with your own:

http://google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

Next, create an account with Google Webmaster Central, add your site, and submit your XML sitemap.

6) Install Google Analytics
Add Google Analytics (free) to your site. Don’t forget to verify your site with them to get the data collection started.

7) Run some Google Ads
Create an account with Google Adwords and start running some ads, even if its just for the domain name, company name, or some long tail keywords. Google has to go to your site because of their quality score, which includes “your landing page quality”. Just spend a couple of bucks and it can help jumpstart the indexing.

With these steps, you should see your site indexed fairly quickly. I can’t guarantee the 24 hours, but it is possible. At the very least it will speed up the indexing significantly (from weeks to days). Look for the “googlebot” to visit in your site analytics. Then look for your site to show up with Google by doing a search with the site: operator (for example, site:sphinn.com). Enjoy!

35 comments Visited 4497 times November 26th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Easy Robots.txt Builder

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 25th, 2007

Clickability has created a really nice Robots.txt Builder that helps you to configure your Robots.txt file. You can easily build a Robots.txt file to disallow robots into your file structure. There are options for easily adding web search robots, image search, contextual ads, web archivers, and even “bad robots”. The bad robots puts in a default list of a ton of robots that you can keep out.

With the announcement of the new sitemap autodiscovery code for Robots.txt, I hope they add something for this, even though its pretty easy to implement yourself.

2 comments Visited 1411 times April 25th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Yes, you SHOULD Submit a Sitemap to Google

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 12th, 2007

While others have spoken against submitting your sitemap to Google et al., I am going to stand up for sitemaps all across the web, and give you several good reasons for having a sitemap (now you can do sitemap autodiscovery instead of submitting).

1) Get to know your site - Every site owner should know what a sitemap is and to have at least physically seen what it looks like and glance at the pages it contains. Many sitemaps, interestingly, end up with images, favicons, and stylesheets listed in them, which is not what the sitemap is intended for.

2) Improves index freshness - If you blog once or twice a day, run a news site, or have user-generated content, your sitemap can help search engines get familiar with your pace so their index keeps up nice and fresh.

3) Trust and Credibility - Although probably not a huge factor, submitting a sitemap does show to search engines you are real, exist, and care enough to create a sitemap. I doubt the majority of the spam sites that steal blog posts (mine and yours) for their own content actually use and submit a sitemap. My philosophy is that anything that can improve credibility and trust with a search engine is a good thing, especially when establishing a new domain.

Some people have complained about seeing pages drop out of the index because of submitting a sitemap, and then once they remove it they see an increase. There’s a nice thread over at digitalpoint on this topic. Ultimately I don’t think it’s necessarily your sitemap. The number of pages indexed can fluctuate week to week for any site. And if there is a huge drop in pages, you may want to consider checking out your sitemap to see if it is giving full coverage to all the pages of your site.

So my opinion is yes, you should submit a sitemap. Some people think the search engines are “evil”, but they’re really trying to deliver a fantastic product that users will enjoy and use. They’re not trying to “trick” us by asking for a sitemap. They have spent millions of dollars supporting the ability to submit a sitemap, and its not so they can drop pages from their index. They want to be better and they want you to be better.

So go ahead, create a sitemap!

If you need some help creating a sitemap, sign up for SoloSEO where you can easily create and update your sitemap. There are also many other tools out there, although we think ours is pretty slick.

1 comment Visited 2651 times April 12th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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How to Configure Sitemap Autodiscovery in Robots.txt

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 12th, 2007

At Search Engine Strategies New York it was announced that you can now have your sitemap automatically discovered by configuring it in your Robots.txt file. It is simple and easy to do, you’ll just need to know the URL or web address of your sitemap.

First, open your Robots.txt file on your server for editing. Then you will need to add the following line to the end of the file (it can be anywhere, but the end is probably a good place).

Sitemap: http://www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml

Save the Robots.txt file with the new line for the sitemap URL. There you go! Your whole file may look something like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /somefolder/
Disallow: /somethingelse/
Sitemap: http://www.soloseo.com/sitemap.php

Search engines already come to your Robots.txt file when they visit your domain, so on their next crawl they will automatically find your sitemap file.

If you have a new site/domain you will probably still want to submit the sitemap URL to the search engines. To submit you can either submit the URL through their interfaces or use a ping.

Submit Sitemap to Google or Ping Google with your Sitemap
Submit Sitemap to Yahoo or Ping Yahoo with your Sitemap
Submit Sitemap to MSN Live.com
Info for Ask.com Sitemaps or Ping Ask.com by hitting this address: http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

10 comments Visited 4666 times April 12th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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New SEO Tool - XML Sitemap Generator

Posted by Michael D Jensen on January 3rd, 2007

Today’s new tool in SoloSEO is an integrated XML Sitemap Generator. Previously you just had to create your own, now we’ll do it for you! All you have to do is initiate the process by clicking a button, and the Sitemap is created while you go on with your SEO. We’ve made it easy to have the most up-to-date sitemap with a small PHP file that calls the XML from our server, but puts it on your own. Google (and the others I am guessing) require the sitemap to reside on your server.

What is an XML Sitemap?
Most people know a sitemap as a page that lets you see the whole site at a glance, like a map. An XML Sitemap has links to the whole site, but because it is XML it is more so intended for a computer rather than a person. Google, Yahoo, and MSN search engines will all take this file and will use it to supplement their crawl of your site. Some people call this search engine submission 2.0, where 1.0 was submitting page URLs to search engines.

Why do I need an XML sitemap?
If you’re a new site, this is one of the fastest ways to get noticed by the search engines. This is the first thing I do (along with Adwords and Analytics) for any new site I create. Typically I find my new sites indexed within a matter of days of doing this.

For not so newer sites, you may not have your whole site indexed by the major search engines (for some reason or another that you should look deeper into), and the XML Sitemap will help Google et al. to see your whole site.

In my opinion, anything that can increase the level of trust by Google et al. to your site, will help you. It’s hard to know if submitting your XML sitemap has any actual effect on your rankings, but if Google trusts you more because of it, I’m in.

But aren’t there tons of free XML Sitemap Generators?
Yes there are! But many of these services, like many free SEO tools, are not maintained, updated, or have just vanished! There is one that I like, XML-sitemaps.com. I paid for the download and it works great, but they have a free version that would work fine for most anyone. With our new tool you can create and update your sitemap with just a simple click, and if you have multiple sites you manage in SoloSEO, it makes it that much easier. Then all you need is to install the 3 or 4 line PHP file on your server, and it will automatically grab your sitemap XML from our server for Google et al. to see.

Try it out for yourself, it will make your SEO life easier.

Don’t forget to check back Thursday and Friday for a new tool each day!

3 comments Visited 2239 times January 3rd, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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