Think Search Engines //

My friend from work posted a question how to get some of his newer web pages into Google. He has created a list of vegetarian restaurants in Milwaukee. Scott, this is a great question. One of the best ways to do this is to use Google’s Webmaster Tools. Included you will find a cool tool called “Site status wizard.” I ran this tool on your website and it suggested submitting a sitemap. This is my suggestion to you. Click on the image on the left to see a detail view of it.

Google gives you a way to create a sitemap of all your relevant pages and upload it to their database for spidering. A sitemap is just an XML file which lists all pages on your site. You also are able to alert Google about the frequency in which your pages change, so their system knows how often to visit your website for updates. Your quickest way to get listed is to create such a sitemap and submit it to Google.

Yahoo offers similar feature called “Site Explorer“. By submitting your sitemap you do not guarantee that your pages will automatically be included in the Google index. Doing so alerts Google to come and spider your website.

For those of you who may not be familiar with spidering, let me briefly explain. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc. utilize automatic robots which are computer programs which crawl the web constantly to look for new and updated pages. They look at your keywords and save them with appropriate pages. Back in their secret computer systems they apply their even more secret algorithms to your pages to prepare these keywords + page combinations for people to find. The better your pages + keywords are done, the better chances of your pages showing up on top of the results page.

Stay tuned for more to come on the subject.