When you launch a new business online, there are a few things that you need to plan first. These includes keyword targeting, a traffic generation plan and link-building strategies. But before all that, you need get in the game first.

This means you need to let the major search engines find and index your websites in their servers. Indexing means the spiders (GoogleBot, MSN Bot and Yahoo)  will come (crawl) and store a copy (or cache) of your website. Then you can be sure that least Google knows that your website exists.

Rather than wait for them to come, why don’t you go to them? This will speed up the process of you getting indexed.

Here I will share step-by-step how this can be done easily through the Google Webmaster Tools. Do take note that you should do this only after your website has been built. Otherwise, it will be pointless to index an uncompleted website.

1) Log in to Google Webmaster Tools using your Gmail account. You will then be brought to the dashboard seen below.

In the above I am submitting www.aidahomar.com to be indexed. Previously I had submitted this blog to be indexed. But I didn’t submit the sitemap because I wasn’t sure how often I will update this blog.

2) You are then brough to this page where you are asked to verify whether you indeed own the domain name you just submitted.

Hah. Google apparently has found my site already. Its partly because of me as I bought the domain a few months ago but didn’t create the website yet. However if your domain is less than two weeks old, it should be a cross at the index status.

In any case, I still need to continue because I have a new website up and Google must re-crawl and index the updated new website pages.

3) Verify your site by using “Upload HTML file option”.

4) Copy the HTML file name that you must create by selecting it and press Ctrl + C.

5) After copying this very long file name, open up Notepad and paste it using Ctrl+V as seen below.

6) Go to File and click Save As. Using the wonderful Ctrl + V function again, paste the filename to be saved as. Make sure there is the .html extension.

7) Open Filezilla and upload the file to main root directory of the domain name.

8) Upload the file and go back to Webmaster Tools. Click on Verify.

9) Website is verified.

Congratulations! From my experience, within the next 48 hours your website should be indexed by Google. Next thing we need to do is to generate a sitemap for the website. This is especially important if you regularly update your website. I will cover this in the next post.