I can’t find my website!!!
Secrets to getting found online
You’ve worked hard to build and publish a website. Now it’s up and you wait for the online visitors to come. You search for your website on popular web search engines and find…nothing? Where is your website?!?
How do search engines work?
Since the web is constantly changing and growing it takes time for search engines to discover and index new web sites. The process search sites go through to find and index new sites is automatic, but takes time. A new site such as yours may not show up on a major search engine site until several weeks after it has been published. If you are interested in learning about how search engines work, here are a couple articles that get into the nuts and bolts:
- How stuff works: Search Engines
- Wikipedia: How web search engines work
- Search Engine Watch: How search engines work
Submitting your own website to search engines
The good news is that you can expedite this process by manually submitting your website to search engines. You only need to do this if your site is relatively new (e.g. less than a month old) and not yet appearing on any search engines. Here is a help file with links to popular search engines to which you may wish to submit your site.
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Friday, 3 September, 2010 at 8:55
This information is very useful. But what if my website name is different from my URL, which one should I promote?
Friday, 3 September, 2010 at 9:03
Good question Kerian. I would recommend that you promote your website by the URL. I would also recommend that you name your website the same thing. This will make it easier for people to find and link to you online.
If you’re not happy with your domain name you can always register a new one. You can also point multiple domain names to the same site. It doesn’t have to be a “.com” It could be a .org, .net, or .biz.
CB