SUBMITTING YOUR SITE TO THE SEARCH

The first step to bringing in traffic is alway s putting your site on the

search engines. There are dozens of those but I’m just going to

mention the two most important.

If your site is liste d on Google a nd on Yahoo!, you’ ll be a ble to catch

most of the users looking for sites like your s.

1.1 Getting Liste d On Google

To put y our site on Google, you don’t actually have to do anything.

If you alre ady have plenty of links around the Web pointing at your

site, then Google’s crawlers should pick up on it and include you in

their listings.

That’s great if you already have links.

But if you don’t have links, you can just submit your URL directly at

www.goog le .com/addurl/?continue=/addur l. There’s no guarantee

that that will get your site listed though — or when — but it doesn’t

hurt to try as a first step.

You can also use a ne w service that Google is curre ntly te sting,

called Sitemaps. This offers some fantastic tools that makes

keeping track of your site’s ranking (and any problems with that

ranking) a breeze . Yo u’ ll be able to lea rn which of your URLs Google

has had trouble crawling and the reasons they couldn’t crawl them;

the common text in exter na l links to your site (so you’ll know what

your users were looking at before they reached you); and best of

all, the most common search queries that sent users to you.

It will also help Google keep up to da te easily with pages that have

been updated. For an AdSense site that’s very important. While it’s

possible that you’ll have static content and focus on bringing

streams of users in to view it, it’s more likely that you’re going to

be adding pages and posts to keep visitors coming back and fresh

ads going up.

Sitemaps should help Google list those new entries much faster,

giving you users for those pages right away.

You can take a look at Sitemaps, and submit your site at

www.goog le .com/webmasters/sitemaps/. You just have to enter

you URL, verify that you’re the owner by uploading some metatag

infor matio n, and you’ll pick up a ton of valuable traffic information

for free.