I am curious to what is the exact steps DPers are taking to get their sites out there once they are completely designed and ready to go? The reason I ask this is... I have a site that I have had up for a year now. After I built the site I never ever touched it, nor did anything with it. I stumbled across that site tonight on my server and decided to look at it for a bit. I noticed that not a single page was indexed in google. It is not banned either, I checked that also. I do know... that I never ever submitted that site to google. Is that required or will google automatically find your site? In my case, they appearently did not. Maybe someone could enlighten me on this process and share the process you are using once your site has been uploaded. Maybe... Directory submission, maybe you do a search engine submission tool at the start? I don't know? Share with me and the community, the baby steps you begin with. I was very shocked to see that the site had no indexed pages after a year. Maybe I am missing a needed file or something... like a robot.txt or htaccess? What files are a must have? Any ideas or tips?
once the site is up and running: 1) create a sitemap and submit it to google, yahoo and live, using their respective webmaster tool. 2) start building backlinks. 3) update your site with fresh unique content on regular basis. 4) pray.
Google finds all sites automatically, don't waste money on any search engine submission tools or services. A robots.txt and .htaccess can be useful for various purposes, but they won't help you getting indexed. Just make sure that you don't deny access for googlebot (or all bots) via the robots.txt in case you have one and check if you .htaccess contains anything that may prevent your site from getting spidered. Next, check your metatags and make sure you have no "noidex" tag all over you site. Everything ok? Then build links to your site and wait
"Google finds all sites automatically" This is true - a search engine searches for sites BUT it has to have a way of finding it. One backlink placed somewhere that google crawls is all it takes. But if you don't have that - search engines won't know the site exists.
* complete your web site * complete on site seo * build backlinks * wait * build backlinks * wait * build backlinks * wait * build backlinks * wait ...
All valued information. Thanks to everyone. Quick question though...? If the site has no robot.txt or htaccess file, then what? Do you rely on those online generators to create you one? Or, is there a standard to creating your own?
The #1 rule Just update your site frequently and don't look your statistics and Adsense earnings for the 1st month. Zero earnings and low visitors may cause frustration but don't give up. Only continue updating your site. And here are all the rules: Find a specific niche. Don't create a site "a few things about everything". Specialize on a subject. Update frequently Put unique content Avoid copied content/RSS auto-imported content. It will be completely ignored by the search engines. Try to get backlinks from relevant sites Avoid putting your link on irrelevant sites Avoid putting links to irrelevant sites on your page Don't spam the Web with your site's links Use Wordpress or another blog script with autopinging feature Create a sitemap and put a cron job on your server to ping Google twice a day
It depends on how often you update your site and on the quality of the content. For instance, if you have a blog and you post 1-2 new unique nice quality articles per day, you will need 3 to 5 months approximately to start seeing much traffic.