One of the first steps to a good SEO campaign is ensuring that your website has been indexed by all the major search engines. Google, in particular, is of main concern to the majority of webmasters and SEOs purely because it is the most popular and widely used search engine. While some webmasters still insist on submitting their site to various other search engines, directories, and via the Google submit a site page.
While none of these methods will do you any harm and may generate traffic that is completely independent of your listing in Google, the quickest and potentially easiest way is using the method that Google prefer, an inbound link from a Google indexed page.
For years, webmasters busies themselves submitting to DMOZ (also called the open directory project) as well as to major search engines like Yahoo. While these methods will eventually see your site listed with Google there is no guarantee exactly how long it will take. Both have potential problems.
Yahoo can take as long as eight weeks to review and list your site, and DMOZ could potentially take as long as three months. Even once you are listed with either of these you are looking at a wait of four to eight weeks before you appear in the Google index. All in all you could be waiting four months to see your site indexed.
Google also have a submit your site form but this suffers a similar problem. The lead-time between submitting a site for approval and actually being indexed can be months. This, of course, is presuming that Google even agree to index your site. So that really only leaves us with one option to try and prevent a wait lasting several weeks to several months.
Inbound links (IBLs) are deemed to be a vote of popularity for a website. Google loves to crawl through the internet following only links from one page to another and from one site to another. This is the preferred method of travel in the Google index and offers by far the quickest way to get your site indexed and listed within the search engine results. Of course, you have a long way to go before you start to reach the top billing, or the headliner spot, but it is the beginning.
Perhaps the most important factor when attempting to gain your first IBL is how quickly the page it comes from gets indexed. The principle is that as soon as your link is found on the page of another site by the Google spider, it will work through your page and index that too. This means that if you can get your link on a site that is being indexed every few days by the Google bots then you might only have to wait a week before your SEO results are showing in earnest.
It doesn't necessarily have to be a trial to get your first IBL either. Most article directories are regularly indexed, in many cases every single day. If you don't want to submit to tens or hundreds of article directories then find the most popular and submit to that one. Popularity, in this case, is determined by the number of articles a directory has within its pages. The more articles a site has the more often they are likely to post them. Google indexing works in such a way that the more often a site adds new content, the more often the spiders will crawl on by to look for new content to index.
As soon as Google sees that you have a link they will crawl to your site and index it. It really is as simple as that. The only difficulty that remains is writing the article, and including a good link with relevant anchor text but we'll save that for another article.
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