If you type “website“ into Google you will be told that there are approximately 1.3 Billion results for website. That’s an awful lot of website’s jostling for a place in the top ten.
The aim of this post is to help small businesses, that might not have a budget for a complete optimization solution, to be able to take the necessary steps to a) protect their company name and b) ensure that the search engines are aware that their website exists. Just to be clear, what’s being talked about here is getting listed in the search engines, and not how to improve your ranking in the search engines.
NB. Each of the main screenshots in this article, can be click on for a larger view.
Step One: Preparation
Register Email accounts
It’s now very important to protect your business as fully as possible online because [see the previous post on Spamming Google Local] otherwise you might find that someone else is using your company name to sell their products. The first step is to register a series of email accounts, which will be used to authenticate your business in ‘Step 2′. Try and make the email addresses you register share the same name of your company (if available) because you might need to use one of these email addresses if your own company email server packs up.
- Register a Yahoo email account
- Register a Microsoft Hotmail email account
- Register a Google email account
Prepare a site map
A site map is a way to provide users and search engines with information about the pages and hierarchy of your website’s structure. Essentially there are two types you should be aware of, each with a slightly different focus.
- Visitor site map: This site map will show the information to a user, usually with the design of the website wrapped around it. Its role is to communicate to users the pages and sections of a website (here is the site map of BBC Wiltshire), so they can quickly find the relevant section. If you don’t have a site map like this on your website already, you should create one as they are useful for those users that have trouble understanding your site navigation. In the absence of a designer, you can do this simply by using a bulleted list, the indent feature, and the add hyperlink tool in MS-Word. The document can then be save as an HTML page and add linked from your web pages (not very pretty, but functional).
- Search Engine site map: The search engine site map is slightly different in look and format, because it is typically in XML format and seeks to satisfy a different objective: to get pages on your website crawled and into the search engine indexes.
How to create an XML site map?
There are a number of software tools that can be used to create an xml sitemap, and the easiest we have seen is this one. You simply provide a website address and, so long as the website is not more than 500 pages, the free service creates an xml site map that can then be posted to your web server. For the more technically gifted, GS Crawler, is a free software program that performs exactly the same service, but has a greater degree of configuration, such as being able to post updates automatically to your web server.
If your website uses a Content Management System (CMS) the chances are that the manual process described above can be skipped and your IT team can run a script to generate an xml site map automatically.
For example for the CMS Joomla, the Xmap component is recommended. Whereas for Wordpress users, Google XML sitemap plugin is recommended.
Whichever method used to create the search engine site map, once it’s been created, it should be uploaded to the server. Typically it is good practice to place the site map in the root of the server. This means that it would be found at the following address in your browser:
http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
Recap: At this point you should have registered all the necessary email accounts, and created a search engine site map that you have uploaded to your server.
Step Two: Signalling your website to the search engines
The act of making the search engines aware of your website, is in fact much easier than it used to be. That’s because of competition between the search engines (”we want the biggest index”) and because of the standardizations that have occurred in the language of the web (xml, html).
Currently your website needs to be signalled in three (shortly to become two) search engine indexes. This section will provide you with a guide on how to do this.
First, to complete this phase you will need the following pieces of information.
a) details for all the accounts set-up in Step One.
b) the address where you site map is located on your server (such as yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml)
Google.com
Visit this link and enter your Google e-mail account details. After you have logged in your will see the following screen
Google Add a Site
Click the button 
and enter your website address, eg http://www.yourdomain.com, and then click okay.
The next step is a verification process, and this can be done in two ways.
a) Meta tag verification: Selecting this option you will be provided with a meta-tag to place in the homepage of your website. Simply copy the code, and place it between the <head> </head> tags on your website homepage (such as index.html or index.php).
b) Upload a verification file: This is our preferred method, however the instructions from Google are not clear on how this file is created. What you need to do is copy the page name that Google provides, such as googlex0323411.html, and then use that name as the save name of a text file. You should create a new file on your desktop (such as a text file), and then name the file according to the specification by Google. So the text file should be saved as “googlex0323411.html”. The contents of the text file should be completely empty.
Verify your listing
Once you have completed one or other of the steps above, you should click the button marked verify. You should then receive a message that your website has been verified. If you don’t you should go back and check that you have followed the steps correctly.
After verification you should see your website listed in your control panel. Click on the website and on the following screen look for the area called “sitemaps”. You should see a link “add a sitemap” where you can specific the location of the site map on your server (eg. www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml). Once you have submitted your site map return to Google’s webmaster tools in a couple of days (sometimes an update can occur in a couple of hours) to make sure that your site map has been crawled and that there were not any errors.
Congratulations, you have just added your website to Google!
Bing.com
Microsoft’s Bing search engine is much easier than Google’s webmaster tools, so if you’ve already added your site to Google, this will be a breeze.
You will need the following
a) the Hotmail account details created in step 1.
b) the location of the site map on your server
First visit Bing’s webmaster centre and login using your Hotmail account. On the following screen click the button [show add a site] to arrive at the following screen.
Add a site screen
Enter your domain name and the location of your site map. You can also enter an email address to receive information and support from Bing (optional). Once you have entered this information click submit.
Enter your website details in the boxes provided
As with Google there are two ways to authenticate your website.
a) Meta tag verification: a unique meta tag can be added to your homepage, simply copy the code on the page, and place it between the <head> </head> tags on your website.
b) XML file: by clicking on the link 
you can download a file to your computer and then upload it to the root of your server (IE http://www.yourdomain.com/[location of xml file]
Whether you choose a) or b) it doesn’t matter. Afterwards you will be able to return your main control panel and see see your website listed. If you then click on the website (click on the text www.yourdomain.com) Bing will search for the verification file and, if everything is okay, you will get a summary screen with any information already stored about your website, this data will increase over time as it is gathered about your website.
Congratulations, you just added your website to Bing.
Yahoo.com
The recent news of Microsoft taking over Yahoo’s search will be implemented over the following 2 years. That means the for the time being it is still worth going through the steps of signalling your website at Yahoo.
You will need the following
a) Your Yahoo email account details
b) the location of the site map on your server
First, visit Yahoo site explorer and you’ll be shown the following page.
Site Explorer
In the box enter your domain name and click on the button “add my site”
Add a site box
You will then be asked to login to your Yahoo account. Use the account details created in Step 1 and once you’ve done this you should see the following screen, with your domain name listed under the column marked “site” [show 3-sitescreen.png]. You should then Click on the name of your domain to see a its summary.
Site Added in Yahoo Explorer
In the left hand menu, an item called “authentication” will have appeared, and you should click on this link. You will then be provided with two possible options for authentication.
Look for Authentication on the left menu
a) Meta tag verification: You will need to place a copy of the supplied meta-tag on your webpage in order to confirm the authentication process.
b) Download authentication key: You can download an .html authentication key which needs to be uploaded to your server (as has been done for both Bing and Google).
c) Create your own authentication key: In cases where it is not possible to download the authentication key, alternative instructions are provided to create the key manually (essentially following the same process as for Google)
Once the relevant file has been uploaded or the meta changes made to your site, you can then click the button “ready to authenticate” and, if everything proceeds as it should, you will receive the following message, [show 6-yoursitehasbeenauthenticated.png].
After authenticating your website, click on the link on the left menu “authentication” and then enter the location of your website sitemap into the box provided as follows. That’s it.
Congratulations, you just added your website to Yahoo.
You have just given your business a major push in the search engines, and probably saved yourself anywhere from €200-€500.
In part two, we will look at how you can monitor and protect your business name online.
