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If you’re having trouble getting your site noticed by the search engines, you aren’t alone, and you may not be doing anything wrong, per se. It may be a matter Suburban Tires doing more of the right things than discovering some grievance you probably have not committed.

It used Koi Tatoo In Tribal surprise me that in the age of social media on the Web, and open resources such as blogs, that there are still people who need help figuring out how to get search engines to find their sites. It’s so easy to forget that there are new people on the Internet each and every day.

Then there’s the fact that for a given term, there are only 30 choice spots, with the majority of traffic going to the top five.

If you’re having problems getting search engines to notice your site, don’t despair. There are ways of being included in search engine databases until you can afford to have a professional do the job for you.

The first step to being indexed is getting spidered. When someone mentions the word “spider” in the context of search engines, they’re referring to the web robots that crawl the internet, traveling from link to link in their quest to find content suitable for inclusion.

So how do you get spidered?

Many people would say to submit your site to the search engines, but for about three years now, it has been my experience that direct submission should be the last thing you try rather than the first, and that some submission processes are better than others.

As far as search engines, you really should only bother with the top three or four at first, depending on your site. Web directories are a different story.

Here are the three fastest, easiest ways to get FAVORABLE inclusion in a search engine, starting from the fastest, most likely way, to the slowest, least likely. I emphasize favorable because not all submissions methods are alike.

Method One - Get Spidered by Getting Linked from Another Site

This can get you into a search engine in 24 hours or less. As we discussed earlier, search engine web robots crawl the web looking for links to sites they can include. Therefore, it stands to reason that if you can get your link on a frequently spidered page, you can get included more quickly.

More popular sites tend to get spidered more often, some daily, some several times a day. Look for a site, in your genre if possible, and get your link displayed on their site. How this will happen will vary.

If you’re lucky, you can post to a popular forum and have your signature link picked up. There are also some blogs that have adjusted their blog software so that legitimate blog comments count in the favor of the person who posts a comment.

So even if you don’t blog, you can get spidered from a blog if you’re smart enough to pick the right blog, and actively, thoughtfully, participate in the community.

(Making off-topic or generic posts won’t help you. Blog software also has comment moderation and other technology to ensure unwanted posts don’t get through.)

If you can get a site to use your chosen keywords as the words they use to link you (called your anchor text), it’s all the more likely that you’ll get picked up.

However, don’t become overly concerned with this. Get included in the database first (also called being indexed). There are plenty of hassle-free ways to get anchor text links.

Method Two - Get Spidered by Submitting a Sitemap

You should also get spidered within 24 hours using this method, though it’s been known to take longer. This isn’t why it ranks number two though.

While submitting a sitemap and keeping it updated lets the major search engines know what they missed picking up at your site during a crawl, it’s a method that doesn’t carry any extra benefits the way linking does.

Being linked from an authority or resource site in your industry carries with it the implication that your site is also a relevant resource in that category. Anchor text can give strong hints to the terms you should be ranked for, clues that search engines often follow.

On the other hand, this is a relatively fast method of being spidered, and can fill in any pages that were missed.

Here’s where to get more information about submitting a sitemap.

To Google: google.com/webmasters/sitemap

To Yahoo: siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites

To MSN:blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2007/04/11/discovering-sitemaps.aspx

Many other search engines don’t have clear protocols for sitemaps yet, but you can let any search engine know where your sitemap XML file is by including it in your robots.txt file. (A file in the topmost html folder on your server that indicates where the search spiders have permission to go in your site, among other things.)

Just add this line, replacing the address with the full link to your sitemap:

Sitemap:mysite.com/sitemap.xml

You can get more information about sitemaps at sitemaps.org

Method Three - Get Spidered by Submitting Your Site Manually

This is fairly straightforward. You cut and paste the link to your site into a form. It’s the easiest way, there’s no file to build and no link to get, but it’s also the slowest. Search engines don’t call your house and tell you the status of your submission either.

Here are the pages where you’ll find basic submission instructions or information.

For Google: google.com/addurl/

For Yahoo: search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html

For MSN: search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

You need only submit your html sitemap page or your home page - as long as the rest of your site is linked from the page you choose, there’s no need to submit more than one page per site.

We’ll talk about how to tell if you have been spidered, and the difference between being indexed, and being ranked, in the next article in this series.

Tinu is a retiring website promotion specialist who writes a daily traffic tips column. Learn more about how to increase your website visitors from search engines and all sources, for Tattoo Dictionary at http://freetraffictip.com - check the video section for free, recent tutorials.