Hi everyone. Hopefully here im going to tell you how to register yourself with the Google search engine and get yourself in their results.

Ill start the tutorial assuming you already have Meta tags or other search engine optimisation techniques in place. This tutorial is solely about registering with google.

At one time i thought simply using meta tags etcetera would get you listed in Google, i then found out that didnt work, so i wondered why, and the fruits of my labour are what will go into this tutorial.

the first step is to get a google account, this will get you access to Gmail as well as the webmaster tools which is where you want to head once youve got an account. To get there g into the "my account" section and look for the webmaster tools link.

once there you should be prompted to add a website, you will see a table there and at the top is the text box for the url of the website and the button to add it. First step is to type your website's full URL in there. If its a subdmain like here at T17 you can miss out the "www." its not important here, but if you have a TLD i would suggest putting it in. Once you click the button you will see the next page.

In the yellow box click on the "Verfiy site" link. There are two options in the drop down list here, either to add a META tag using HTML or upload an empty HTML file. Im going for the HTML file method as this requires no technical skills so is perfect for everyone. ONce yu select that option you will see a filename, copy this filename down and create a HTML page with that exact file name. Now upload this file using FTP or a file manager into your website's "Public HTML" or "www" folder, this is for T17 users, if your host doesnt have these folders then put the HTML file in the same folder as all your other website files. Check its uploaded by visiting this page. Then click the button to continue.

The purpose of this, as Google itself says, is to allow you to access more stats about your site and to confirm you are the registered owner of the website. So by now you should be on Googles list of website to crawl, however you might not get listed in any results for a while until Google adds you to their searches. If you want Google to crawl your whole site then this is enough for you, it may take a while for Google to crawl your site. When it does you will see some statistics in this Webmasters tool panel including the number of times Google has crawled your site and if there are any broken links or dead URLS or other errors.

Most of you will have some folders like images or files which are included by automatic scripts and such. For these folders you can stop Google and other search engines from getting to them. For this will we use robots.txt, this is simply a text file with the afore mentioned filename that is uploaded into your website's public html, or equivalent, directory. Basically this file contains some instructions which tell "robots", the things that google uses to search with, not to go into certain places, the main use is to prevent search engines going into your image folders and linking your images which is bad for people stealing your art work and is a drain on bandwidth.

So to use robots.txt click the link on the left hand side that says "robots.txt analysis" This will take you to a page with two large text boxes, the first shows your robots.txt file, the second is for testing URLs to see what Google will do when it tries to get in them. Firstly if youve never used robots.txt visit the link Google gives on this page and look around that site and get to know about robots.txt and the "code" or syntax. Now the best way to do this is to copy and paste some examples of what they give you and simply change the slash for the folder you want. For example to exclude the images folder i used



Add as many lines as you wish to exclude any folders you want, i would suggest blocking the image directory if you have any original artwork or graphics or any large images as they will be shown in google image searches and drain bandwidth and most likely the images will be copied. Now once you have the code for the text file you want copy and paste it into the top box on the webmaster tools page, now in the lower box type in a url that shou,ld be blocked by the robots.txt file, for example, mysite.com/images. google will now tell yu if it is allowed to that folder or not, if it all works as expected copy and paste the code into a file called "robots.txt" and upload it, again into the same folder as all your other website files. This should now stop Google and other search engines getting into protect directories.

now another way to get better results is to add a sitemap. go to the sitemap tab at the top and then click "Add a sitemap" now choose a general web sitemap. Here again there are a few options, i will take you though the text file option as its the easiest, you an experiment with the other methods if you wish.

Make a text file called sitemap.txt the exact name isnt important but keep it a txt file. In here list all of the URLs you want google to search, eg http://www.site.com/page.htm List every page you want searched one per line:



Then upload this file into the same directory as before. Now type the URL of this file into the box provided and add it. Now you will get confirmation of the fact the sitemap is in use and are pretty much done!

Some tips on increasing your position in searches are on the google site, a good one is get links from popular sites. For example if you got a link on the homepage of trap17 straight to your site your pagerank would increase, this would lead to a better position in search results. Other tips are on the site for you to look at.

Hopefully this helps some of you who are new to search engines and how to get on them. Dont forget to use the cpanel tools, if your host provides them, to get your site on many other search engines, they might not be the biggest engines arund but a hit is a hit right?

Good luck in getting high on the ranks, if you can do that then your website is almost guaranteed high visitors!

Very useful. Thank you.

Thanks for the guide on adding your website to google i think i will add mines now.

wow man nice it is really usefull thanks

Thank you shadowx!
I used to always go to http://www.google.com/addurl/ and add my site. But it wasen't working out!
My blog was finally listed but it' sposts were not indexed at all!!
What you have laid down makes sense and seems to be much better.
I'll try it out and will let you people know if I get better results.

Thank you very much!!!!

Thanks for all the positive comments! Im glad it helped, with any luck we can all enjoy more traffic now!

thanks this has really helped thank you very much i'm gonna sort out my site and put it on there later your great thanks

thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaank youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu alot man.........

This is very very very useful topic and I would like to put my site to google ( as i have a GMAIL account ) but after getting my site from trap17

and thank you very much again man