This article explains an brief view of how to get recognized online and how Google and other major search engines identify your blog.
How Search Engines know about your blog
Internet is a huge repository of millions of interconnected PCs and information stored in them is distributed all over the world. So, in order to get your quality content in blog indexed by the search engines, first step is to know about your site’s existence first.
There are many ways to submit your blog to search engines. You can submit your sites to search engines or link with other sites. In either case, search engine spiders can identify your site and index your site
How to notify Google about your blog
There are three different ways to submit your blog and recent posts to major search engines such as Google.
#1 Robot.txt:
Once your website is submitted to the search sites, the search engine spiders (also known as crawlers or bots) will attempt to navigate your site to understand its content. A robot.txt file maintained on your website will tell the spiders which all folders and modules on your web server are allowed to be crawled by them.
#2 Sitemap.xml:
Once the robot.txt allows spiders to crawl certain areas of your server folders, the sitemap pitches in to provide more details. The sitemap.xml file contains all your pages, posts, links to tools and web applications etc that need to be made visible to the public users. Sitemap.xml will also contain more details on these pages such as when it was last changed, the priority of the page etc that help spiders to decide on when to index them.
Basically robot.txt provides folder/file level access details and sitemap.xml provides detailed information on pages. These two files are essential for any website that is search engine friendly and they are usually maintained at the root folder of your website.
Link level instructions to the spiders
In addition to the above to files, there are page and link level instructions that help spiders to decide whether to index a page or a target page that is pointed to by a link on the page (URL). These are page meta tags and link properties and I shall talk about them in another post soon.
Additional tips
- Sitemap.xml is usually submitted to search engines via tools such as Google Webmaster Tools. Even robot.txt can be analyzed sample robot.txt created there in
- Submiting your website or blog to search engines can be either done manually per search engine or done via bulk submission services (paid as well as free) offered by certain sites
- Submission of your website does not necessarily guarantee that your site will be appearing in search results immediately. There are other aspects to prioritizing your site contents’ weightage
Now adays search engine spiders have been indexing latest content automatically. But if you think your blog is not indexed in search engines, these blogging tips help you in notifying search engines about your blog.
