5 Ways to Get Your Blog Indexed by Google in 24 Hours

We all know that content is king and that if you keep blogging… if you keep doing what you love… the traffic and the money will follow suit. While that’s partially true, there is also things that you can do to:

• Index your newly launched blog fast by major Search Engines
• Increase traffic to your blog
• Improve your SERPs (Search Engine Result Positions)

Why wait right? Content can be king but waiting around for traffic to come by itself is not a good way to start blogging. So let’s start…

Getting Indexed

Let’s say you launched a blog today and want it on Google’s results tomorrow. Can this be done? Yes.

Easiest way to get indexed by major Search Engines is to get mentioned by established blogs. This usually will get your blog indexed within 24 hours. But since we are new (i.e the newly launched blog of ours) I don’t think any blogger want to mention it. So instead of begging other bloggers to notice your newly launched blog, you just have to figure out other ways of getting indexed by Google fast. Can it be done? Absolutely! (All it takes a little effort on your side).

1. Blog Communities

There are few blog related community portals that have a very good rankings in Google and other Major Search Engines Results, they are: MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, Blogged and NetworkedBlogs, particularly MyBlogLog. This means that if you get your blog on these blog communities, Google will have no other choice but to index your blog. So, go ahead and register for an account on these communities and list your blog on it. Once you are done you will have a page like this, this and this.

What to pay attention: Your blog’s description (have a proper write-up), keywords & tags (add related keywords and tags to your listing, this will be used by other members to find your blog), branding (put your logo, avatars, screenshots etc. have a consistent branding everywhere), and list your blog in the correct category.

2. Site Valuation & Stats Sites

Some of those How Much Your Site Worth? sites have a good ranking in Search Engines. All you need to do is to go there and check how much your site worth. This would create a special page for your blog (like this) and consecutively it would be indexed by Google. Here is a list of worthy sites: WebsiteOutlook, StatBrain, CubeStat, WebTrafficAgents, BuiltWith, WhoIs, QuarkBase, URLfan and AboutTheDomain.

3. Feed Aggregators

List your blog’s feed in these feed aggregators Feed-Squirrel, OctoFinder, FeedAdage. Once you have submitted your feed to these sites, they will keep track of your newly published posts and index them in their site. Whenever someone clicks on the blog post title, he/she will be redirected to your original blog post sending you free traffic and getting your latest posts indexed by Google.

4. Social Sites

Registering account on Social Sites with the same username as your blog’s URL is very effective in getting your blog indexed by Search Engines. Especially for those targeted keywords.

For example, if your blog’s name is WhiteElephant, it’s a good practice to register the same username at twitter as @WhiteElephant, and to create a page in Facebook at www.facebook.com/WhiteElephant. Having a consistent keyword-username on all major Social Sites will help get your blog indexed faster, and at a later stage it will also help build a “brand” for your blog.

So, get account on major Social Sites for your newly launched blog, namely: Twitter, Facebook (create a page for your blog), Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious etc. By the way, it’s a good pratice to create a separate Social Sites account for each of your projects. This way you can stay focused and post messages that are related to your project. In the long run, this will help build a community that are like-minded around your project.

Note from Darren: it’s worth nothing that many social media sites (like Twitter) use no follow tags on links which means the links don’t really help with SEO. Having said this - it’s still worth getting pages for your keywords/brand as these pages can rank in and of themselves in Google and can help you to have control over numerous search results for the same keyword.

5. Misc Sites

Squidoo is a community website that allows people to create pages (called “lenses”) on various topics. Creating a topic that is related to your blog and then including your feed in that page would help your blog get indexed by Search Engines. Squidoo used to have a really good ranking in Google results, but not so much today. But it’s still ranks well and it shouldn’t be neglected.

ChangeDetection is a website that monitors sites for changes. When you monitor a particular site using ChangeDetection, it will ask you whether you want the notices to be public or private. If you say public, it will be published in their news section. For example; AdesBlog.com got an update today, type of update: text additions etc. This of course will get picked up by Search Engines and Search Engines in return will index your blog.

Technorati is a search engine for searching blogs. According to Wikipedia, as of June 2008, Technorati was indexing 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media. It’s a dying breed, but not just dead yet. You have to definitely register for an account and get your blog listed on Technorati.

That’s it. Once you are done with creating accounts and submitting your newly launched blog in the above mentioned sites, you should see your blog in Google’s Search Results within 24 hours. Most of the time it will appear within the next few hours only.

Lastly, getting indexed is one thing but sustaining that traffic is another. And this is where the Content is King phrase should truly be emphasized. Because, without a good and valuable content, all your effort will be just wasted.

I hope you have found this post useful.

How to Promote a Blog

Last year I wrote a post exploring how I use Social Media to promote my blogs - the post looked at the idea of creating Home bases and Outposts (a metaphor that I picked up from Chris Brogan).

In this video I extend the idea a little and talk about the importance of not only develping a presence on social media sites but also making connections with and developing a presence on other people’s home bases. You can see the full sized video on YouTube.

Here are the screen grabs from slides I’m sharing on this today at the MarketingNow conference in Melbourne.

How Did eMoms at Home Come Out of This Page Rank Scandal Unscathed?

Edit: I have noticed that my Entrepreneur.com blog is still showing a page rank of 0. I believe we have not seen the end of this Google “update” – especially because there are no reported increases at all across the board. All I can say is brace yourself for whatever is next.

As many of you probably already read today, several of my peers and mentors were slapped by Google today with significantly lowered page ranks – as much as from a PR7 down to a PR4 in some cases.

Andy Beard and Daniel Scocco are providing ongoing coverage of the sites taking a hit. And it’s not just popular blogs – even the Washington Post and Forbes.com have gone from PR7 down to PR5.

The good news? Everyone seems to be reporting the same or more traffic from Google SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

I was at a PR5 yesterday. I’m still at a PR5 today. I’d like to point to the things I did differently than people like Darren, Brian, and even the team over at BlogHerald – but I really have no clue. I believe we all have focused on bringing quality, relevant content to our audience and have always put the reader experience first before revenue. I believe we have all sold links at some point (though I turned down a cool $1000 for some text link advertising in August because of my Google fears…).

Theories are everywhere – some suggest the fact that being part of a blog network has hurt some of the sites, or perhaps that the incoming links are being devalued.

Frankly, I’ve been rather tight-lipped on the whole subject, mostly because I am not at a point in my business in which I can afford to rock the Google boat. I guess you can say that their scare tactics have worked on me – and I feel rather sad about that.

At the same time, I’ll be the first one to admit that I don’t understand Google, algorithms, nor could I pull off anything black hat if my life depended on it. I’m certainly not implying that anyone who has been hit is engaging in black hat tactics – far from it. I’m just saying that my level of SEO knowledge, though pretty advanced for my audience (work at home parents) is far less than that of my peers in this industry.

Perhaps it’s my relatively simplistic SEO implementation that has helped me skirt under the radar?

I’d really love to hear what you think about the issue:

Do you think Google is doing the best thing for their own users?

How could this be hurting their users?

How could it help?

And what are your predictions about Google’s intentions? Why do you think they are doing this and where do you think they are headed now that they have taken steps down a road that is certain to make quite a few (large and small) businesses angry?