Let’s say you have a new business or website, how do you get Google, Yahoo, Ask and Bing to index your site? Let alone give it a high ranking?

Well, I have compiled a list of things that every webmaster/site owner or internet enthusiast could and in some cases should do to ensure that a website gets indexed in as little as a day or two.

10 steps to index your site in one day….

1. Create at least 3-7 pages of content.

Hey, a “Coming Soon” or “Under Construction” page with an animated construction worker gif was great in the 90s, but today it won’t get you very far… Create some pages of decent, readable, and useful content . Remember that text in image format is not crawlable! Make sure you do the basic SEO things correctly:

• Each page MUST have a unique page title
• Each page should have unique meta tags for the description and keywords
• All links/href MUST have “Title” properties and images must have descriptive “Alt” properties
• Avoid a “loading” message or page redirect for your main home page

2. Create a template/menu structure

Make sure all pages link to each other using a template menu structure. Ideally, links/href should be text-based and descriptive, so they can be easily crawled.

3. Make sure HTML pages are correctly formed

Go to totalvalidator.com or use W3C Validator – validator.w3.org to make sure your pages are well-formed. Search engines will rank you lower or even ignore you if your pages are poorly written and don’t include enough information. I also recommend making sure your website is cross-browser compatible, using a tool like Multi-Browser Viewer or similar.

4. Create a sitemap.

Sitemaps have evolved over the years and still exist in various forms (HTML, RSS and graphical sitemaps). However, Google and the other major search engines have adopted a common standard that will list all the pages on your website and help identify the most important pages. There are quite a few free sitemap generators out there. For small sites I recommend this: xml-sitemaps.com

5. Create a Webmaster Tools account and send/ping the sitemap.

After you have created your sitemap and uploaded the sitemap to the root of your website, you need to submit the sitemap to the various search engines. It is recommended to create a webmaster tools account on the various major search engines:

• Google (www.google.com/webmasters/tools): Google has a very useful Webmaster Tools feature, which allows you to view additional information that is useful to all webmasters. It is essentially Google’s view of your website.
• Bing (www.bing.com/webmasters): Bing’s webmaster tools have also improved dramatically over the past year, but they’re still not as useful as Google’s.
• yahoo (siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com): Even less useful than Bing, but still necessary for now.

Once you’ve signed up for the various webmaster tools, you can resubmit updates or ping your updated sitemap to search engines at any time, although it should be automatically crawled and updated. Ping Search Engine Sitemap / Submission URL:

• Google: wwwgoogle.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=[complete sitemap address]
• Yahoo: search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=[Complete sitemap web address]
• Ask: shipping.ask.com/ping?sitemap=[your sitemap web address]
• MSN Live: webmaster.live.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=[your sitemap web address]

Note: Google requires that you submit your sitemap first through the webmaster tools interface. Only then can you ping the old URL. Yahoo and Ask.com also allow the ping to act like a send.

6. Link from high-traffic bookmarking sites

Search engine crawlers regularly visit these sites, so if there is a link to your website, it will get indexed pretty quickly. You will need to create an account on these sites to allow them to link to your site. Some of the bookmarking sites you can use include Del.icio.us, BlinkList, StumbleUpon.com, and digg.com. Social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace will also help. Try linking using some of the popular phrases like the list at the bottom of the BlinkList page. At the end of the day, it’s all about getting high-quality links to your site.

6. Create/comment on a blog.

Create a blog at blogger.com or another blog provider (there are many different blogging options these days) and start writing about your area of ​​expertise and how it relates to your website. Feel free to promote your site, as long as it contributes to an open discussion and isn’t just another bogus blog/marketing scheme. The alternative is to mention your website in a comment on someone else’s related blog, but again it has to be as part of a discussion where you make a contribution to that person’s blog!

7. Comment on popular forum/help pages.

Be sure to include your website URL as part of your forum profile and comment on a forum you are a part of, or help a newbie to a topic you are an expert on, on a related forum or help site. It’s also about some good web karma!

8. Install and activate Google Analytics

Google Analytics is probably one of the best gifts for any webmaster. Sign up for free Google Analytics at www.google.com/analytics. You’ll need to add a simple script to all of your HTML pages to ensure proper tracking, but the information you’ll gain is extremely valuable and will help you improve and better target your pages over time.

9. Use Google AdSense

If it makes sense for your website, you can consider running Google advertising on your website. Although AdSense and AdWords are supposedly indexed separately from Google search indexing, there is some evidence to the contrary, and some sites that serve AdSense advertising have been indexed faster than sites that do not serve AdSense advertising. Hey, you might even win a few bucks, it might be worth a try, right?

10. Use Google AdWords

Again, very similar to point 9, there’s no real evidence that advertising your website’s domain with Google AdWords would actually benefit you, but if you want to cover all your bases and get indexed as soon as possible, it’s worth a try… al Less AdWords allows you to generate targeted traffic to your site in a matter of minutes. By using Google Analytics above, you can also track conversions and start measuring your ROI.

If you follow these 10 steps your site should be crawled by Google, Bing and Yahoo pretty quickly, obviously I can’t guarantee your site will be crawled in a day… but following the 10 steps above will go a long way in making sure you get indexed and they track quickly. Remember that the above can ensure that you get indexed and listed in search engines quickly, but only a regularly updated site with high-quality, useful content will ensure that you rank highly in the various search engines.