One of the things I hear a lot from business owners online who’ve spent a LOT of money on web designers and SEO companies is this:

“Why isn’t my site the first result on Google or any other search engine?”

Well, the answer is simple, and not one that they really want to hear.

The fact is that it is extremely difficult to be the first result on Google or any other search engine.

This article should help first get your site indexed and listed on a search engine.

There are thousands of search engines out there, but only a small fraction of them are likely to send you more than a couple hundred of visitors each month.

Instead of submitting your site to as many search engines as possible, please focus your energy on the top four.

Google
Yahoo
Bing
Ask

Though honestly, Google is KING. Combine ALL the other traffic you get from Yahoo, Bing and Ask, and it still won’t equal what you get from Google.

Having said that, once you have narrowed down your focus, SOME SEO “experts” will tell you to submit your site to your chosen search engines.

Don’t. Because it’s the SLOWEST way to get your site indexed. In fact, Google even has a little penalty that smack you with if you submit directly.

You are FAR better off just buying a text link from a high profile site for a month or two. You’ll get indexed faster and the results are much more likely to stick.

But if your web master “insists” on submitting your site directly to the search engines, here are some tips:

1: Do NOT spam the search engines. Once you submit your site to a search engine, don’t submit it again the next day — they got your submission.If you continue to bother them with “hey look at my site” submissions, you risk having your site banned and have it never get a listing at all. Some times it will take up to 2 – 8 weeks for your site to get fully indexed and listed properly.

2: Be patient! For the most part, you do not need to re-submit your site over and over again. If you make some major changes or additions to your site, there is no harm in re-submitting it 3 months later, but not every week.

Now “old school” advice is to add what’s called a “revisit tag” to your pages, but it’s a waste of time. If you’re getting back links to your site (and you should) the search engine spiders or bots will revisit your site automatically – often coming by several times a day at first.

Doing so helps the engine determine the frequency at which you post new content. The more often you post, the more often they will revisit.

Hopefully, you have planned your website launch and previously optimized your site for search engines. If you have not done this yet, you should still have some time to do this.

“Optimizing” for search engines – search engine optimization – means having the right things in the right places so that spidering programs (also known as “robots”) get the information and impressions about your site that you want them to get.

Make sure you have the right meta tags, keywords and the right content on each page.