SEO Learning Center >> Getting Recognized

How to Get Your Website Recognized by Search Engines

Here's an SEO-related question I get about once a week. "Can you help me? I have a new website but it does not seem to be recognized by the search engines yet. How do I get my site on search engines like Google?"

This question typically comes from a website owner who (A) realizes importance of search engine visibility for business purposes, but (B) does not understand how search engines work — or how to get recognized by them.

It's a good question, because it shows that the person asking it has a certain level of motivation with regard to the website. Fortunately, it's also an easy question to answer. The process of getting your website recognized by the major search engines can be summed with two words — time and links.

Getting Recognized - Time and Links

If you wait long enough, the search engines will find your site on their own, simply by crawling the web on a regular basis. This process is fully explained in another article in the Learning Center, so I won't go into it much here. But suffice it to say that search engines are constantly scouring the Internet in search of new websites (like yours). When they find a new site, they add it to their database or "index," and thus that website is now recognized by the search engines.

So that covers the time factor. Your site will eventually be found Google, Yahoo and the others, simply by being part of the web. But who wants to wait? Every day your website lingers in obscurity is another day of business lost. So you want to get your site recognized as soon as possible, right? Right! So that brings us to the second factor in this process — links.

If other websites link to your new site, then the search engines will find it much more quickly. In fact, I've had a new website recognize by Google within 48 hours before, simply because it was linked to from a news website (via press release). If the site that links to yours is frequently updated — and therefore frequently revisited by the search engines — then the incoming link will be even more helpful in getting your website recognized quickly.

Manually Submitting a Website to Search Engines

If you own a website (and I'm assuming you do, because you're still with me), then you've probably received a spam email offering to submit your website to the search engines. Let me save you some time and energy in this area — don't waste your money! Search engine submission services are an unnecessary waste of money. I've already given you the "secret" to being found. Just create some one-way links to your website, and it will be recognized in no time at all.