Well, you've built your website, it looks great, but now what? How do you get your website indexed by the search giant Google? And besides, what is this indexing thing everyone's talking about?

Well, let's cover the "what is" first.

When Google finds or is told of a site that needs to be indexed, it goes into a queue. This is their (yes) index queue. Once your site reaches the top of this que, Google sends starts up a program called a crawler or bot and sends it over to your website or the page on your website that it found.

It basically loads the page into memory, strips out all the pictures and fancy formatting and stuff and is left with nothing else but text. This text it then runs through mulitple (search) algorithms to identify the content of the page it is busy with. Basically it counts the words and relates them to topics. Honestly, it is a lot more complicated and I'm only giving the highlights.

OK, now it starts indexing your page according to words and phrases. So, if you have a sentence "Google is the biggest search engine in the world", the GoogleBot (that's its name) will go and say, fine, folks, this is:

• Keywords
  • Google
  • biggest
  • search
  • engine
  • world
• Phrases
  • Google is the
  • Google is the biggest
  • Google is the biggest search
  • Google is the biggest search engine
  • biggest search
  • biggest search engine
  • etc, etc, and so forth and then some.

Now, if you look at the keywords, all the "is" and "the" and "in"'s have been stripped out. These are called "stop words" and do not really carry any meaning except when it comes to the phrases section. The phrases section is where Google has made the most progress in their algoriithm and what puts them apart from the rest.

Don't ask me how their algorithm works, though, cause only a few people in the world knows that!

Now, back to the topic. Google's got all the keywords and phrases from your page and it's been stored. Now it checks to see what pages you're linking to (so it can store them and crawl them later) and what pages link to you (this helps with your pagerank, which I'll discuss in a different article).

And now you page is inserted into the index and can be found via the search engine... if you've done proper search engine optimisation, that is. But that's another topic all together.

Now, how do I get Google to index my page fast? The answer is provided by Google themselves in the form of their Google Webmaster Tools. Google basically gives you the ability to add a website and its sitemap to their index and will crawl your site within a few weeks (at the most).

So, what's a sitemap, you ask. A sitemap is like the websites table of contents. It is a hidden file on your website (usually called sitemap.xml) that is stored in the XML format (loooong story). So, (this assumes you know how to generate a sitemap), the best thing to do is generate a sitemap (or have someone do it for you) and then create an account with Google Webmaster Tools (at http://www.google.com/webmasters), add your site and then submit your sitemap to Google.

Then, login a day or so later to see what Google's feedback is.

Honestly, folks, their Webmaster tools is the best and has helped one of my sites to be indexed and listed second on Google in two days! OK, I did also do a few other special things, which will also be coming out soon.

Questions and comments are welcome.

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