Submitted by Florida Web Media on
How long does it take for a website to get indexed by search engines?
You've successfully launched your business website and are hoping that search engines will find and index your website soon. Not so fast! Unfortunately, there's no one answer to the above question. There are many factors that may influence whether your website gets indexed or not and appears in search engine result page when relevant keywords are used to search for your business. In order to get your website indexed, you have to take some additional steps to speed up the process, which is, let Google and Bing know that your website exists.
How do I tell search engines that I've launched my website and is ready to be indexed?
First of all, your website must be complete for the end users. Then you need to create a "robots.txt" file using any notepad application. With "robots.txt" file, you have to allow search engines to index your website by writing the following instruction:
User-agent: *
When search engines come to your website for the first time (and every time), the first thing they look for is "robots.txt" file. When they see the above instruction in your "robots.txt" file, they will look for the internal pages of your website to index. There's one little problem though. Initially, search engines do not know the number of pages exist on your website. So search engines have to work extra hard to find the pages. Sometimes, they may not crawl all the pages and leave your site after indexing a couple of pages. Since you (the publisher of your website) know the all the pages of your website, you can easily tell search engines what they are by including them in an "XML Sitemap" file. Thus, making it easy for search engines to crawl your website and expediting the process.
How do search engines find all my website pages and index them?
Next, you have to create an "XML Sitemap" file. You may name your XML sitemap file as "sitemap.xml". Again, you may use any notepad application to create a "sitemap.xml" file. Please see sitemaps.org on how to create an XML Sitemap. Make sure you include all the web pages that you want search engines to index. When you're done, reference it on the bottom of your "robots.txt" file as follows:
User-agent: *
sitemap: http://www.website.com/sitemap.xml
(Make sure to replace website.com with your domain name)
Upload both "robots.txt" and "sitemap.xml" files to the root directory of your website.
Finally, signup with Google and Bing Webmaster Tools and submit both "robots.txt" and "sitemap.xml" files you've created using these webmaster accounts to speed up the indexing process. Few days after submission, go to Google and Bing and type the following to see if all of your website pages show up in Google and Bing search result pages.
site:website.com
(Make sure to replace website.com with your domain name)
That's all there is to it! However, submitting your website sitemap to Google and Bing is not a one time process. Every time you add a new page to your website, you need to include that page in your "sitemap.xml" file and resubmit it to Google and Bing from your webmaster accounts. If you need additional help with sitemap submission, please contact Florida Web Media.