Inclusion in Search Engines
Optimising your website to be found on the search engines is not the only thing you can do to improve its performance. There are other factors that can also help.
FIRST THINGS FIRST – INCLUSION OF YOUR WEBSITE IN THE SEARCH ENGINE INDICES
Obviously your website must be included in the search engine’s index before it will appear in its results. We mentioned this earlier but to recap, if your website is more than a month or two old then it is likely that it will already have been indexed. All it takes is a single link to your website from an already indexed website or directory and the search engines will find your website automatically
As mentioned elsewhere, Google offers an advanced operator that can be used to determine how many pages that it has indexed on your website. This operator is known as the "site operator". To use it you enter site:www.toucher.co.uk into the Google search window (replace toucher.co.uk with your website name and ensure that there are no spaces).
This will then list the pages from your website that Google has in its index. If it does not list any pages then your site is not indexed.
The pages that are listed by the "site:" operator look like this.
If you click the link that says Cached on any of these listings you will see the content that Google has stored in its index for that page. There is also a date on the cache listing, which indicates when the Googlebot last visited that page on your website (see search engine indexing page for more information on the Googlebot).
If your website is not listed in Google you need to either submit it or wait until Google finds it. Personally I prefer to submit it myself. That way I know for sure that it has been done but it is not really necessary as google will find it if you have even one link into your website from a site that has already been indexed. There are three main search engines and while Google is by far the most important you should submit to all three.
Google Site Submission: http://www.google.com/addurl/.
Bing (Microsoft) Site Submission: http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx
Yahoo Site Submission: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
Sometimes the Search Engines can change the location of these links. Should any of them change you can find the updated location by searching for the term "submit URL to searchenginename".
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