How to make your new website visible on the web

Making your website visible on the web, that is getting search engines to know that your website exists, is not an exact science. There is lots of information out there, some of it useful, some of it contradictory.

I am in the process of tying to make this website visible on the web, in particular I would like to see it appear in search results, and eventually I would like to fine tune my website so that certain sections appear when searching for certain keywords. Like many other site owners out there I would like to see if I can get my site near the top of the search results on all the major search engines. As I find out more information I will add it to this page so it can be a single reference for anybody trying to improve the visibility of their website.

Today (25 Feb 2007) my website has been in existence for about one week, it contains 9 pages and 7 images, and about 5 "outbound" links. Outbound links are links on my site that link to other websites, the opposite is called an inbound link, that is a link on another site which links to my site.

My website is not indexed by any search engine.
update: as of 28 February my website has been indexed by just one search engine, MS Live Search.
update: as of 8 March my website has now been indexed by Yahoo! (see my blog for details)

An easy way to check if your website is indexed is to use the tools provided by many of the search engines. For example Google has a index checker within it's Webmaster Tools site.

The following sections show the steps I am following for my website in order to improve it's visibility:

1. HTML Validation

Firstly, your pages need to be compliant with the WWW Consortium standards. If your pages are not compliant and contain lots of errors then it is very unlikely that they will end up indexed by the search engines.

Be aware that even though your pages may appear fine in Interent Explorer there can still be many erorrs on the page (IE makes lots of allowances for errors). The search engine crawlers (the process by which search engines discover and index pages) will encounter errors, ignore your page and move on.

You can check if your pages are compliant and error free at the W3 Validator site. Simply enter the page URL and the validator will parse your page and report any errors, it will tell you where the errors are and even suggest how to fix them.

Next you need to ensure that you can reach all of your pages by following links from your home page. If you can't reach a web page like this then search engines won't be able to reach it as they generally start their crawl at your home page.

Check that you don't have any broken outbound links, in fact you should regularly check all the links in your site to ensure that they are still valid. Search engines (and users!) don't like broken links. There is a tool called Xenu Link Sleuth which automates the process of checking your links.

With a new website it is unlikely that you have any inbound links therefore there will be no way of the search engine crawlers finding you unless you specifically tell them that you exist.

The process of doing this is called "URL Submission", which basically means that you explicitly tell the search engines what the URL is of your home page.

The following links take you directly to the URL Submission page:

Once you have submitted your URL the search engine crawler can find your site and start indexing it.

Several Search Engines, such as Yahoo, Google and Microsoft provide facilities for managing your website's relationship with the Search Engine:

Firstly you need an account with Yahoo, Google and Microsoft, generally an email account such as Yahoo Mail for Yahoo, GMail for Google and HotMail for Microsoft.

Once you have signed up you can add your website to your account by firstly verifying that you are the actual site owner. This is achieved by either adding a page provided by the search engine to the root of your website, or adding some code to your sites home page.

Once you have done this you will need to wait a few days for the search engine to verify ownership. Once your site has been verified you can use the various tools provided to check when your site was last indexed, view any errors encountered by the crawlers and even submit a sitemap of your site (more on this later).

Although web directories are not as popular as they used to be, they can still be a good source of traffic to your website. Inclusion in a directory also increases the importance of your website in the eyes of the search engines.

The most important directory to get your website included in is the Open Directory Project which is referenced by Google. The Open Directory employs human editors who will review your website before adding it to the index, therefore you must ensure that your site is of a reasonable quality and is not just an "under construction" placeholder.

I submitted this site to the Open Directory on the 1st March, apparently it can take several months for a new site to appear in the directory. I will keep this page updated with its progress.

Once your site is being indexed by the search engines you will want to monitor various statistics about the visiors to your site. You will want to see if anybody is actually visiting your site, how they got there and what they do there.

Therefore I have added Google Analytics to each page on my site. This will allow me to collate statistics about my site; I will be able to see how many visitors I get, where they come from (where in the world they are located and how they arrive at my site, i.e. which keywords in Google they used), and which pages they looked at.

It is very simple to install on your site, once you have signed up for access (it is free) you simply add a small piece of JavaScript to each page you want to monitor.

There are other website tracking packages available, I will look at some of those in due course.

Last Updated: 28 March 2007

© Andrew Sinclair 2009 [andy@andrewsinclair.co.uk]