Search engine optimisation (SEO)

When setting up a new website, you will need to let search engines know about it. This allows them to start including it in their search results.

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 Search Engine, 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. See what is a search engine and how do they work?

This can take time - especially if you are including niche engines in addition to the main, more popular, services. 

You will probably not need to do this for websites that are already established, 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. 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.