How to get your website found and indexed by Google?

The easiest way is to use Google Add url service. Unfortunately it doesn't give you any control about the indexing process - the way that Google looks at every page on your site and saves them in it's server for people to search from.

Google also offers another free service called Google Webmaster Tools (GWT). We recommend using it because it allows you to:

• Submit your site to Google
• Control updating rate and force Google to revisit your site (by re-submitting your sitemap)
• See when Google has visited and indexed your site
• See how users reach your site (incoming links and keywords)
• Get Google's view of your site
• Diagnose problems (broken links, duplicated page title)
• etc. 

Submit site to Google: Webmaster Tools

To use the Google Webmaster Tools you first need to sign up. After signing up you can add the address of your site (www.mycompany.com). When the address is added Google asks verification from you to confirm that you really are the owner of the site. You have to choose HTML as verification method that gives you a code looking something like this: "googlef52f1d814b8972e9.html".

We have added an easy way into Edicy to add this Webmaster tools verification code to your Edicy website.

Using Google Webmaster Tools in Edicy 

You can add the verification code to your site in the Site properties view. You will reach it if you click "Site" - "Settings" and choose "Account details" from the right menu. Scroll down and enter the verification code (something like googlef52f1d814b8972e9.html") into the "HTML verification file name" field and press Save settings. After that you can complete the verification process by pressing the "Verify" button in your Webmaster Tools account.

It is a good idea to also submit the address of your sitemap.xml to your Webmaster Tools account. Edicy generates a sitemap.xml for your site automatically. You can find it's address by adding a "sitemap.xml" to end of your site address (like www.mycompany.com/sitemap.xml). You can submit this address under the "Sitemap" section in "Site configuration" menu in your Webmaster Tools account. If you want to force Google to re-index your site after you have made some changes, just re-submit your sitemap.

Future tasks - get to the top

Once indexed you have half way to go. It requires a lot of work to get to the top in Google search results. The way to get to the top is to promote your site - promote it in popular blogs, websites and sites of your friends. Let them write about your site and link to your site. But of course the prerequisite for that is that the content of your site is valuable and interesting. We'll write more about how to make it to the top of Google in a further post.

Some useful links

• Google Webmaster Tools
• Tour of the Google Webmaster Tools
• Webmaster guidelines
• Webmaster tools by Yahoo
• Webmaster tools by Microsoft
• Pingomatic blog pinging service
• What is Sitemap
• SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Crawling & Indexing