Welcome to part 2 of the basic search engine optimisation guide. This part of the guide will deal with “How to get indexed in the search engines”.

So your site is live on the Internet but what next?

Firstly we need to make sure that it is listed in a search engines database. Each search engine sends robots often called “spiders” to crawl the web, they follow each and every link on a page and read and “index” all of the content it comes across. This information is then stored in a search engines database ready for someone to search that information.

To test if your site is indexed you can add go to your search engine of choice, I’m going to use Google and type in your full URL (Uniform Resource Locator or web address).

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The image above shows that if I enter http://www.philbenwell.co.uk into Google and hit search my site is found in the results. This test can also be performed in other search engines such as MSN’s Live Search and Yahoo!

If you entered your site and found it listed congratulations you are indexed, if not read on…..

I’m not listed what do I do?

Each search engine is likely to have a submission page like Google’s - http://www.google.com/addurl/ . These can be used but they can take a long time to index your site. I think from memory most suggest a 4-6 week allowance for your site to be crawled, this is a long time and besides we don’t want to wait that long. A quicker way to get your site indexed is to get another site that is already in the search engine’s index to add a link on their web site, to your web site. This way the next time the googlebot or spider crawls their site it will follow that link to your site and index all of your pages and content.

I will explain how to build links and why this is an important part of SEO in part 5 of this guide.