Why Can’t I Find My Website In The Search Engines?
There’s two main factors to finding your website in the search engines, the first is to verify that it is actually included in the search engine index, and the second is that even if it is included in the index, it may not necessarily rank very highly on its own. The purpose of this post is to help you establish if the reason you can’t find your website in the search listings is an indexing, or a ranking issue…
What Is A Search Engine Index?
Search engine indexing is the process whereby they include your website in their list of potential results that match a search query. For example when you type a phrase in Google, it searches its index, which is like a huge database containing billions and billions of web pages, and according to its highly sophisticated algorithms, it tries to return the websites at the top of the list that it thinks will be of most use to the visitor.
So How Do You Get Included In The Search Engines Index?
Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN typically use two methods to include websites in their indexes. They don’t know about your website automatically, and they either have to be notified of its existance, or by discovering links to your website from other websites. To notify them that your website exists, you can submit your URL (your web address) to inform them. When you’re top in the queue to be spidered (the process of Google visiting your page and analysing all of the content), they will visit your website and you will start to be included in their index. This will then allow you to appear in the search results for certain terms. There is unfortunately no way to influence how quickly a website is included in the search engine indexes, however, by gaining links from other sites to your own, you can speed this process along. Here are the addresses you should go to to submit your website to the top three search engines:
Is My Website In The Search Engines Index?
To determine if your website is included in Google’s index (which had a market share of 44% of all web searches in July 2006), you should type these terms into Google (obviously replacing yourdomain.com with your own domain name):
site: http://www.yourdomain.com
If your website is included in their index then you will see that Google returns the amount of pages from your site that are included. So if you are included in the search engine index, but don’t rank well for your chosen keywords, then the problem is a ranking issue, which can be fixed by a solid marketing campaign. Our website promotion guide is an introduction to the essentials necessary for ranking highly in the search engines.
Written by Chris Pangburn.
