In the dark days of history long ago, search engines were not the omnipresent deities they are today. They had flaws like mortal men, and they did not see all that goes on in their domain. To make yourself known to the search engines was to gain power, a following, a resonance throughout the Internet. It was a process, an ordeal, to submit your site to the search engines. People paid good money to have others more knowledgeable than they do it for them.
Today, the search engines have ascended. They are as close to all-knowing as it is possible for them to be, and they grow their near-omnipotence with each passing year. You no longer need to submit your site to their systems; chances are they already know. Even so, you can go through the motions, like praying to a god above. Perhaps they will take notice sooner, and set you on your path.
Avoid Submission Services
Beware! The men of the past who sold their services to those who wished to attain higher power still remain, their profession base and corrupted. They know as well as I that the search engines will find you on their own, given time. There is no need for you pay a tithe to gain their notice.
Worse, beware those who would proclaim to put you before the attention of hundreds of search engines. Those claims are, perhaps, true, but those other search engines are but motes compared to the might of the high pair Google and Bing. Those lesser engines fade at the merest glimpse of what you draw from the high pair.
Check if You’re Already In
You are new to this world, and so I give you advice you may not otherwise know. You may already be within the gaze of the pair. Until you have cleansed yourself and dedicated your site to the tenets set forth by Google, you may not even see the effects of their notice. You may, however, freely ask of the high pair about your status.
All you need to do check upon your status is approach the pair in their homes, www.google.com and www.bing.com. Once there, simply state your name in the ritual form, site:www.yourURL.com. The engines will relay to you the presence of your site, should they know of you. If the response you receive is one of ignorance, of blank emptiness, then you are not yet within the notice of the engines, and submission may be in order.
Manual Submission
The most basic form of ritual to submit yourself to the notice of the engines is a direct petition. Each of the engines has their form, which you must accept in order to submit yourself to their notice. You can find them in these locations:
Bing: http://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url
Google: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url
Simply visit each of these locations in turn, with your site location in hand. Input your URL, pass the test presented by the gatekeeper Captcha, and submit your petition.
There is no confirmation for these petitions. You will simply need to use the site:URL ritual form again, some days in the future, to check if your petition was accepted. If it was, you will see a response. If it was not, your query will once more turn up empty.
Build Links from Indexed Sites
Another potential means of gaining the attention of the search engines is to gain the attention of one or more of their high-ranking acolytes. For example, should you hail from the country of SEO, sites such as Moz.com are amongst the most notable acolytes around. If you can obtain a link from one of these sites, a followed, indexed link, the attention of the search engines can pass from Moz to your site in turn.
This works because the omniscience of the search engines is artificial, relying on the backs of feeler bots that are sent out on the tireless errand of following every link available, recording the destination, and reporting back. Links to your site, in sufficient number and quality, are highly beneficial. Obtaining them when you are otherwise unknown to the search engines will add you to their awareness.
Create a Sitemap
The most respected, effective and useful method of gaining the attention of the search engines is through a map of the self. You will need to visit your own site and generate such a map, noting down the location and generation date of each extremity. You can use certain tools for assistance, but again, you do not need to pay for this service to be done for you.
The site I have given you above will generate this self-map for you. It creates an agent similar to that of the Google and Bing, and sets it loose on your site. It pulls and registers the important information from each page on your site, and presents the information to you in a singular document. This document must be kept up to date going forward, though this is easy to do. Simply add new pages to the map when you create them, or install an assistance plugin to perform that ritual for you.
Place this map on your site in a location visible to the search engines, and bring that location to each in turn.
Submit a Sitemap to Google and Bing
The process for submitting this map of your site to Google and Bing differs for each. You can find a summary of the instructions, as well as a document detailing their minutiae, below.
- For Google, you will need to adopt the tools of the engine, their Webmaster Tools. You will need to verify this adoption through one of the available methods.
- Within these tools, once verified, will be a site configuration option. Beneath this option, you will find an entry labeled “sitemaps”. This is where you will submit your sitemap’s location.
- For Bing, the process is similar, though you have other options. You may follow the same process with the Bing Webmaster Tools, though you do not necessarily need to use these tools.
- Alternatively, you may simply use an HTTP request or the sitemap directive in your control robots.txt file to guide Bing to your sitemap.
Once again, when this process is complete, you will be able to perform the site:URL ritual to check for your presence in the awareness of the engines.
If You’re Still Not Indexed
If you have performed the above rituals and, after several weeks, you are still not present in the awareness of the search engines, you may be suffering under a punishment, earned with by your site or by the previous holder of the name. You will need to identify the cause for this punishment and resolve it, before you will be brought back to their light once more.
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