Getting Your Site Listed

New Island In The Pacific

If somehow you could construct an island in the middle of the pacific ocean you would soon be discovered because of satellite imagery. Geologists and the US navy would rush out to your new island to check things out. Simply post your new website on the internet and your site will remain undiscovered. Your site might as well be an island that emerged in the pacific ocean 100 years ago.

How To Get The Word Out?

You can get the word out with business cards, feature the site's address in the church bulletin and on bumper stickers. Many other good ideas are available at Promoting Your Church Website, written by Bill Aumack.

Established sites get more than 80% or 90% and more of their site's visitors from the search engines. More and more, people are turning to Google or some other search engine instead of reaching for the phone book. So how to get listed in the search engines? One of the best answers is to get your site listed in the directories that list your type of site. Even if a search engine has your site listed, the more directories and relevant sites that list your site, the more popular the search engines will conclude your site to be.

Quote From Google

Getting your site listed by other sites is a top priority based on this quote from Google:

"If your pages haven't been indexed yet, it's probably because there aren't enough other pages on the web that link to them. Google looks at the link interconnectedness among pages, relying on the vastness and openness of the Internet to yield the most relevant search results. If other pages don't link to yours, we can't assign your pages a PageRank™ (our proprietary measure of a page's importance) in a reasonable way. Once other pages point to them, we'll pick your pages up."

Search Engine Submission Not Much Help

Submitting your site to Google's submission page would seem pointless when what you really need is at least one good site linking to your site. Other search engines (e.g. AltaVista) are reputed to respond to submissions. A lot of search engines feed off of Google which gets us back to the conclusion that incoming links to your site are the most important thing to pursue.

Why Google?

Google is the primary site to get listed with. 70% of searches are done with Google. 20% with Yahoo and Yahoo used to feed off Google. All the other search engines combined represent the remaining 10% and that includes AOL and MSN. AOL now owns Google and feeds off Google.  If Google finds you, then you will soon show up on AOL and Yahoo. Your first priority is to get listed with Google which means getting listed with the directories and sites willing to link to yours is a top priority.

How Long Does It Take?

Google states that their robots update their index about once a month and the process of indexing a new site can take another couple of weeks. If a site is under construction (clearly changing between robot visits) the robots may wait until the site stabilizes. In addition to the monthly main crawl, Google also does fresh crawls on a more frequent interval, depending on the PageRank popularity of the site. Getting your site listed on a popular site will get you listed sooner in the Google index.

Has My Site Been Indexed?

Here is how you find which pages on your site have been indexed by Google. In Google, enter the following in the search box:  site:MySite.com  Google will return a list of all the pages at MySite.com that it has indexed in it's database. Link:www.MySite.com will list the pages that link into your site. Google only lists the higher quality incoming links (PageRank higher than 3) so it is likely there are additional links to your site that Google knows about.

Link Exchanges

I get frequent requests for link exchanges by people paid on a per exchange basis. Most of these link exchanges are not worth the bother. If one site is about airplanes and the exchange site about horses, the relevancy score will be low. Another problem is that link exchanges typically put their exchange links on a page buried deep and obscure on the other site, with a very low PageRank value. The chances are good that the buried page won't be indexed by the search engines. Occasionally I get a request from an Adventist ministry wanting a link to them on my site. If it makes sense I do.

Ideal Incoming Link

An ideal link to your site would be on the home page of a very popular site linking only to your site and having a high relevancy relative to your site. Lots of relevant incoming links are very important to search engine ranking. One high valued incoming link can be worth more than dozens of low valued links (e.g. from link exchanges and link farms).

Next Page to Read

The next page to read is the Adventist Listing Directories page.