If you want your site seen on the internet, the first thing to do is find out if anyone can see what you have to show them by checking if you are on a website index.
Search engines have to index a site before they can deliver the content as search results.
Luckily, finding out if your web site is indexed is quite straightforward.
Several free or paid-for tools will tell you if your web site is indexed. One of the most popular is seoquake.com – a free browser extension.
Here’s how to check if you are on a website index with the major search engines:
Google – Just type ‘site:<domain name>’ in to the browser search box. For this site, you would type:
‘site:https://www.searchengineoptimisationpro.com’ or ‘site:searchengineoptimisationpro.com’
Google will then return a list of all the indexed pages on your website – well nearly all of them.
The list is not always entirely correct, but it’s accurate enough to let you know what’s going on.
If nothing is returned, then your site is invisible on Google, so you need to do some work. Putting a site map in the root directory is always helpful. You can also go to Google and invite the search engine to pay you a visit.
Yahoo! and Bing – No extra work here. Type the same query in to both search engines and you’ll get a list of the pages listed by each.
As Yahoo! and Bing share the same website index, the results are similar but not identical.
Just like Google, you can manually submit your site for indexing – here are the links for Yahoo! and Bing
Open Directory Project – This is a worthwhile website index as the information is syndicated to lots of other web resources they can offer good links back to your site.
Check if you are included by typing your domain name into the search box. For this site, you would type: ‘searchengineoptimisationpro.com’.
Suggesting a site to the directory is not as simple as adding your url to a search engine – but here’s a link to the page that explains how to go about it.
Be the first to leave a comment