If you’ve just created a new website or a new blog post/article, sometimes it can take a while for the search engines to find it.

While you wait, you’re missing out on search engine traffic and a higher page rank.

Not only that, but it’s possible that another website could steal your content and claim it as their own. If a search engine finds your original content on a different site first, they will get credit and you will be seen as the one copying them.

So what are some ways that you can get the search engine spiders to find your new content quickly so that you can lay claim to it and all the benefits thereof?

And maybe the best question to start with is…

How do you know that search engine spiders are visiting your site?

Is something you can do very quickly to see if the search engine has visited your site or has found that specific page on your site.

Visit a search engine and, in the search bar, type in “site:yourwebsite.com”. The “site:” part of this is search engine speak for “show me only results for the site yourwebsite.com” (the “yourwebsite.com” is, of course, the name of your website).

Find a specific page

Got too much stuff on your website and you need to fine tune the search results? Try these:

1) site:yourwebsite.com crab nuggets tells the search engine to search your site for those specific keywords (in this case “crab nuggets”)

2) site:yourwebsite.com “crab nuggets and other delights” (with the quote marks) tells the search engine to search your site for a specific phrase (in this case the phrase “crab nuggets and other delights” with the words in that specific order)

So if you use the second example with the title of your new page as the exact phrase in quotes and the search engine tells you they have no results, they haven’t found that page yet.

How to get search engine spiders to find your content quickly

So how do you get a search engine to find your content? Here are several ways to get a search engines attention…

Social sites

Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc… are searched many times a day by search engine spiders.

If they find a link that you’ve posted to your site, they’ll follow that link and find your content quickly.

The same goes for popular article sites like EzineArticles.com

What about nofollow links?
Most social sites, when they display a link to your website, include a small snippet of code that says “rel=nofollow”.

This is supposed to tell search engines not to follow your link or give your site any backlink credit. While the major search engines won’t give you credit for having these back links, there is evidence to suggest that they still follow them and will find your new content this way.

Since you should probably be sharing your new blog posts and articles through social sites anyways, this is a good way to get a search engines attention and establish that you are the original creator of the content.

Submitting site to search engines

Search engines have a page where you can submit your website’s url and ask them to send the spiders to your site.

Here are some of the pages:
Submit site to Google
Submit site to Bing
Submit site to Yahoo

Important note: there’s probably no use to submitting your site to the search engines more than once (when your site is brand-new). If you’re using social sites to spread your content around, that’s probably enough.

If you really want to manually submit your site repeatedly, don’t do this more than once every couple months. If you submitted to often, this annoys the search engine gods.

Sitemaps

You can create an XML sitemap for hungry little search engine spiders that will tell them exactly where all your content is located.

If the spiders just aren’t finding what you want them to find, this is another way to make sure they get all the good stuff you have to offer.

Updating content regularly

Ultimately what you really want is for search engine spiders to come back to your site regularly out of habit. You can train the spiders to return often my having good new content available for them each time they come back.

If the spiders notice you have a lot of new content each week, they’ll come back more often to pick up on the new stuff as quickly as possible. If you post new content daily, spiders will figure this out and come back daily.

What I hope you take away from this

Search engines must find your content for your site the benefit, and the faster the better.

Happily you have many options for getting a search engines attention, and the top method (using social sites) is a great way for driving traffic to your website while giving search engines a chance to find your new content and make it available.

The next step…

Once the search engines have found your content, how do you get to the top of the search engine results?

Because the information above will get you ranked for the keywords “crab nuggets”, but if you’re ranked #227 when somebody types “crab nuggets” in the search engine you’re not going to get a lot of love.

Rising to the top of the search engines for the keywords of your choice is a whole different topic that I’ll be covering in future tutorials–join my email list below to read them as they come out!

Thank you for reading, and I’ll see you in the next tutorial!