Getting your site indexed by the search engines

Note: This article refers to the legacy version of the Website Builder. If you signed up to the HostPapa Website Builder after March 11 2020, you’re on the new version of the Website Builder. For help, go here.

Before people will be able to find your site using the search engine’s search box, your site needs to be indexed. It takes time for new sites to be crawled and indexed by search engines. Until your site is indexed, people will be able to find your site by putting your address, such as mysite.com, into the browser window at the very top of the page.

There are some things that you can do to move the process of getting indexed along:

  1. Create good, informative content and update your site frequently.
  2. There are three tags that specifically alert search engines to what a page is about; the title, description and keywords tag. HostPapa Website Builder provides an area to edit these tags. If you click on Page > Page Properties > Metadata, you will find fields to add unique title, description, and keywords tags to each of your pages. For more information on this please see this tutorial: Adding title, description and keywords tags
  3. Submit your site to search engines. This basically alerts the search engines to your site’s existence and puts it on a list of sites to be crawled. We help you along with this by automatically submitting your site for you, but you can also submit your site manually. Here are links to submit your site to be crawled by Google and Bing.
  4. You can submit your site to Google through a program called Google Webmaster Tools. We have posted a tutorial that walks you through the steps to do so here.
  5. Search engines view sites that have many incoming links (links from other websites) as being more of an authority on a topic. Begin building links to your site by:
    • Submitting your website to online directories.
    • Submitting informative articles to article directories.
    • Optimizing your site for local search. Take a look at our tutorial that will guide you through getting started: Optimizing your site for local search
    • Network with other webmasters in your industry, topic of interest and local area and offer to do a link exchange.

 

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