Following the development of your website, one of the early stages of ongoing SEO is ensuring that the search engines index all of your pages. Until a page is indexed it won’t appear in the search rankings but, fortunately, there are several methods to index a website. Before you start developing links or submitting sitemaps you first need to check the structure, menus, and linking of your site.

Search Engine Spiders

A search engine creates its index by deploying spiders to follow links from one page to another and from one site to another. When a spider finds a new page that has yet to feature in the index, it records relevant information and indexes the link and the page. Should a spider find an existing page through a new link, the page will gain any added benefit from the new found link. Once a spider finds its way on to the pages of your website, it’s vital that it is able to subsequently navigate around and index every single page of your site.

HTML Text Links

Spiders are more capable of following HTML or text links, as a pose to Flash or graphics based links, although the search engines have made impressive strides in this area. Ensure that your website offers simple menus or a text link to a compliant sitemap. As well as following links that they naturally find, search engines also offer website owners the opportunity to submit a text based sitemap for inclusion in the indexes.

Link Building

Link building is a major attribute of any SEO campaign, and should be an ongoing process. Links and linking pages need to be relevant and based on a similar topic to that of your own page. The better the quality of the linking page, in the eyes of the search engine, the greater the benefit to your own page. Social media marketing, or social networking, as well as article marketing can both be used to provide beneficial links to each of your pages.

Using Social Sites

Social media marketing requires a lot of regular and ongoing input but can create an almost viral buzz about your site, product, or service. Social media sites are generally indexed very regularly by search engines so gaining a link from a public page on a social media website can get your site indexed equally quickly.

Using Article Marketing

Writing an article, including an optimised resource paragraph with HTML links directed to your site, also enables you to submit this article to the many article directories found online. Because of how frequently new articles are submitted, this also offers a very quick method to get new sites indexed with the major search engines.

Using Sitemap Submissions

Sitemap submissions are also offered by the big search engines as part of their suites of Webmaster tools. Compile and upload a sitemap to your domain that includes every page of your site. Ensure that you link to the sitemap from your home page using a text link. The link can be placed in the footer, the header, or on the template of the page as long as it can be accessed by the search engine spider. This method can also help to highlight any problems that exist with your website and your pages in general.

The Importance Of Indexing

Before a website can be properly ranked and gain the benefit of any SEO content writing and link generation it needs to first be indexed. Search engines typically employ spiders to crawl the Internet and find links to new pages so generating a link from a site that is indexed regularly will help ensure your own site gets indexed quickly. The more frequently a site is updated, the more frequently is is updated in the search engine index. Therefore, building links from popular social media sites or article directories can prove a very quick way of getting your site listed in the search engine results.