Getting Indexed by Search Engines

If you read a lot of articles, guides, tutorials and any other materials about basic search engine optimization, getting indexed to search engines is the most important part of SEO after you've created your site and optimized its content.

What will you do after you've uploaded those web pages, optimized the content as well as your meta tags? Getting listed in SERPs of course! Here's what learned about indexing web pages:

Submitting to Search Engines

Many would say that submitting your home page to search engines is just a waste of time. Well, if your trying to submit on all those search engines then you really are just wasting your time. You can still do this method but my advice is to submit only to what webmasters' call “The Big Three”, namely Google, Yahoo and Bing (former MSN).

You can still get your web pages indexed without having to do this method. There are other ways, which I think are much better, that can help you get your site indexed and faster.

The Power of Social Bookmarking

If you haven't heard if Digg.com or StumbleUpon.com then you're way behind in search engine optimization. These are samples of a social bookmarking sites which is similar to the ordinary bookmark tool we have in our web browsers' menu bar. The difference between the ordinary bookmarking and with social bookmarking are:

• you can access your bookmarks on any computer you use just by registering an account;
• and share your bookmarked sites/links with other people.

Why Should I Submit to Social Bookmarking Sites?

Here are the reasons I've learned why we should submit to social bookmarking sites:

1. For fast indexing - high traffic social bookmarking sites are more frequently visited by search engine spiders. If you submit your site, the higher the chance you have getting indexed.
2. For traffic - people love interesting topics, important news, humor and tutorials.
3. Increase more traffic - posts on Digg, and other social bookmarking sites, also appears in SERP, giving you an even higher chance of web visibility!

Social Networking Sites

Do you like Facebook or Twitter? These are social networking sites where you can add links to a post. Isn't that great?! Now the key to the successful use of social networking sites is you got to have lots of friends; mingle with other members, join different groups, share your profile and be active, don't just login to your account to post a link. This link building technique is very helpful if you use it properly.

I find social bookmarking and networking as a part of link building techniques that you can both use for work and have fun at the same time. Because you get to meet other webmasters doing link building of their own, you can exchange SEO tips and secrets, and the normal internet users you can interact with while doing work. And best of all you can even earn extra income by offering link building services to companies/sites that needs help with their search engine rankings.

Sitemaps

There are two types of sitemaps we can use, the XML and HTML sitemaps.

XML Sitemap - This sitemap is used to inform search engines of pages that are available for crawling in a website.

HTML Sitemap - This sitemap is for your visitors. It is used as a guide/navigation for visitors who are looking for a specific page, product or service you might be offering.

Now, you'll find these search engine optimization techniques quite easy to learn and do. Submitting your site or blog to the big three search engines can take you at least five minutes to do, social bookmarking and networking can be time consuming but it's all worth it, and submitting sitemaps to search engines is a must-do if you want to get all your web pages indexed.