CEMIT Ireland

When setting up a new website for your business, you will need to let search engines know about it. This allows them to start including it in the search results they give to their users.

Registering new sites

You will only need to inform search engines of new sites with newly registered internet domain names. You can do this by filling in search engine forms with the address of the home page for your site.

The webmaster programmes run by some search engines, eg Google's, allow you to submit maps of an entire site. This tells the search engine to start using programs called spiders, robots or crawlers, to index your website.

This can take time - especially if you are including niche engines in addition to the main, more popular, services. Some, like Yahoo!, offer paid directory submissions, which can increase your visibility in their index. While this can get you into the index quickly, it can affect your reputation with certain users, who prefer to trust the natural or organic search engine rankings over paid index inclusion.

You will probably not need to do this for websites that have been up and running for a long time, because existing links from other sites will have already led search engine crawlers to your site.

Submit sites manually

Where possible you should submit your website manually, rather than use an automated tool. Use of automated submission engines can lead to sites being banned by search engines. Manual submission can take longer but usually only involves completing an online form and is only necessary when registering a new site for the first time.

It can take up to a month for a site to appear in an index after it has been submitted to a search engine. In practice the quickest way to appear in a search engine index is to be linked to from a site that is already regularly crawled by the major search engines.

Use the Open Directory Project

An alternative to submitting sites to search engines is to apply to have your site included in the Open Directory Project, often known by its old name of DMOZ. This is a manually edited site, which categorises websites and lists them for users to find.

DMOZ is used by many search engine crawlers as a source of sites, and an entry here will mean that your site will be indexed by the major search engines.