One of the macro lessons that I have learned is that there are simple ways of doing just about anything that you need to do on the Internet. Those who have a passion for the technical side of things endeavor to create simple solutions that are easy for any user to implement. If you think about it, this approach is what made Bill Gates the richest man in the world
Where Are You?
When you decide to create a blog or website, you need the search engines to know that you are there. You might think that all you have to do is get the site live on the web, but that doesn’t mean that the Google bots will crawl it. Remember, I’m not a techie and I’m not going to try to explain the technology and coding behind the practices that I suggest. I’m just going to explain simple tasks that enable anyone to participate in the exchange of information on the net.
The simplest way to get indexed in Google is to burn a RSS feed at Feedburner.com. Feedburner is owned by Google, but burning a feed there got you indexed even before Google acquired it. You just go to Feedburner and follow the instructions. I could add screen shots, but I don’t think that it’s necessary because it is self explanatory.
Once you have your feed address, you add it to the admin side of your blog. In Blogger, there is a place for it built in: Settings>Site Feeds>Post Feed Redirect URL, add your feed address, and save. In Wordpress, you can just install the FD Feedburner Plugin and add the Feedburner feed URL.
Once your feed is live your posts will be found by the search engines eventually. But, you can speed that along very simply by social bookmarking your first post at Digg.com. There are many other social bookmarking sites, and we will post on social bookmarking as a whole, but it’s good to immediately bookmark your first post because the bots will crawl Digg and find it almost immediately and be exposed to your URL. Clearly the more you do this with additional content the better.
Once you’ve done this, you can search for your content in Google to see if you are indexed, but you can also use this function in the Google search field:
site:http://mysite.com
The search results will be a compendium of all of your posts that are indexed in Google.
