Step 3: Get Your Website/Blog on Google

Your website will probably be more useful if you can get it into the google index and into some of the other search engines. If you do nothing, google and the other search engines will eventually find your website with one of its web crawling robots. For TowpathGuy's first website it took about 10-12 days for this to happen.

Google Webmaster to the Rescue

The one search engine that has a vast majority of the search engine business is Google. It turns out that it's easy to get your website registered on Google.

1. Go to www.google.com/webmaster. You'll be on a page called the Dashboard. Here you can enter your website so that you can manage it, including getting it into the google search engine.
   
2. After you enter your website's URL, you'll be at page that says "Overview" with a yellow box at the top telling you that you that the next step is to "verify your site". To do this click on the words "verify your site". You'll be offered two ways to verify -- select the "add a meta tag" and copy the short code by highlighting and typing "control-c" (hold the control key and then type c).
   
3. Go to your blog site on blogger and get into the edit mode and choose the layout tab. In the second row of tabs, select "edit html". Position the mouse just after the code which should be about 7 or 8 lines down and type control-v to paste your meta tag into your blog. Note that you are editing your theme, so if you change your theme, you'll have to repeat this step.
4. Go back to the webmaster page and click on the "Verify" button.
5. Now you'll be back at the Overview page, but now there should be a blue-bordered box telling you that you've successfully verified your site. In the box "Index Status", there are two informational paragraphs. The second paragraph tells you that you have not submitted any sitemaps, so click on the word "Sitemaps" in the column of buttons on the left hand side.
   
6. On the Sitemaps page, click on "Add a Sitemap".
7. In the selection box, choose "Add a General Sitemap" and then complete the URL in option 3 by adding "feeds/post/default" after the URL that is there.
8. The next page tells you that you've been successful and need to wait for several hours.
9. You're done!

If you go back to the Webmaster Dashboard, you can check on your website/blog to see what google's search index knows about your website. From the Overview page you can check out the Index Stats or check on the status of your Sitemaps upload. Google will fetch your sitemaps automatically, but you can also manually resubmit it from the Sitemaps page.

TowpathGuy submitted the Sitemap for this blog on 9/22/08, just before 9:00 pm EDT. Google processed the site map on 9/25/08, around 7:00 pm EDT. Thus, it took about 70 hours. However, the site map is not yet indexed.