When it comes to search engine marketing and search engine optimization, it is very easy for the business person who is inexperienced with the nature of the internet to become confused with how the whole “getting to the top of Google” thing works. There are a number of ways to achieve high rankings in the search engines, and in particular Google, but first of all your website has to be in Google’s index.
A common misconception exploited by some search engine optimization companies is that a website has to be submitted to Google in order for it to appear in its index. This was true in the early days of the internet and when the search engine optimisation industry was just starting out, but as the world has become more connected, computers have gotten faster and the Google tools that search the internet have become better at tracking data and following links, the need to submit your site to Google has diminished.
Google still provides an online form for you to use if you wish to submit your site, but really there is no need to do so as long as you can get a link pointing to your site from elsewhere on the internet. And really, having your site discovered through an inbound link is better than using an online form.
The Google tool that indexes the internet is called Googlebot. This is a small program that constantly crawls the internet looking for and following links. As the Googlebot crawls pages it will follow every link it is told to follow (there is a tag called NOFOLLOW which tells Googlebot not to follow a particular link) and if it is the first time the Googlebot has come across a page, it will set to work indexing that new page and following all the links from it and indexing those subsequent pages.
To make Google aware of your website, you need to get a link pointing to it from another website or blog.
How do I get my first link?
That is becoming more and more difficult as use of the NOFOLLOW tag increases. Over the past few years a lot of sites have been created in the “social media” or “social networking” sector. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter fall into this category. LinkedIn is another popular social networking site, but that is aimed more at professionals who are seeking employment or looking for business opportunities. But these sites use the NOFOLLOW tag I mentioned earlier. This means that Google is being told not to follow the links from those sites. In theory, the Googlebot does not follow those links, but in practice some people are still skeptical. So you have to find another way.
Here are a couple of suggestions:
1) Ask a friend, colleague or associate who has a website to link to yours
2) Submit your website to one of the quality web directories (search for “web directory”) that doesn’t add NOFOLLOW tags
3) Add a link to your Facebook profile and send a Tweet containing a link to your site just in case the skeptics are correct
4) Register with local business directories and create a profile for your business. These sites are less likely to have adopted the NOFOLLOW tag
If you have online experience then there are other methods to use such as writing and distributing a press release or articles, and submitting them to relevant sites to distribute them for you. This is a tried and tested method and if your press release or article is widely distributed, you should get you a lot of links very quickly.
