AFF - Is Your Affiliate Online Business Site Indexed Yet?

Success in an affiliate business online will depend on getting traffic to your website. Traffic is your lifeblood and for people to find your site you need to get it indexed by the major search engines. The two big search engines - Google and Yahoo! - use crawlers to locate pages to add to their search results. Crawlers(or spiders, bots or worms) are computer programs that scour the web looking for pages.

They are the key in getting your site indexed and available for everyone to find. You definitely want your pages to your site to be crawled as soon as possible. Web crawlers view your pages and index them so they are available for searches on search engines. If you are wondering if there are many crawlers out there, Google has over 200,000 crawlers scouring the Internet.

Web crawlers first visit Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) and look for hyperlinks(links that are a reference that someone can click on) in the pages and will add them to the URLs it will visit. So it is a good idea to have links on your sites' pages that link to other pages on your site or other sites you want indexed.

There are deep crawlers who really do a lot of the indexing. They get the URLs from a master list and deep crawl the URL for text, content, HTML, and images. If you have an existing URL, the crawlers give you more relevance and will seek out your new content. With the deep crawlers, it can take up to two months to get indexed, but it can be quicker with a good linking plan.

You can even pay to have your site crawled with Yahoo!. Its not cheap, but you will be guaranteed to have your site indexed by Yahoo!.

Linking is one of your best methods for getting your pages indexed and showing up in high positions in the search engines for certain keywords. What is really powerful is having other sites linking to your site. This will help increase the Page Rank of your site. Page Rank is used by Google and is a link analysis algorithm that ranks pages according to what Google deems most important and relevant to a specific keyword. Ranking goes from 0 to a 10(your highest rank).

If you have high ranking sites linking to your site, Google will give your site more credence and thus the ranking of your site will go up. It is also helpful to use internal linking in which you link to other pages in your site.

Another method of getting your site indexed quickly is through social bookmarking sites such as Twitter, Yahoo! Buzz, Digg, Propeller and many more. These sites allow users to post their favorite sites using keywords relating to the site. If you have a great article relating to your keywords, you can write an article to Digg or Propeller with your website listed and and get indexed quickly. Social bookmarking has exploded over the last few years and if used correctly, can be one of the quickest ways to get indexed. This is a very viral method and should be part of your indexing plan.

Some of your keys in getting indexed by Google are making sure your website has good, unique content with no broken links. Use keywords that are highly targeted to the content of your website. Have a sitemap for your site which tells Google what your site contains and in an organized way. Using Google Sitemaps can actually get you indexed in less than a week. How's that for quick.

Getting your site indexed is not as daunting a task as it used to be. New affiliate online marketers need to make sure they do all they can to get their site indexed as quickly as possible. If you follow the tips mentioned earlier, it should be a piece of cake and you can get on with making money with your site.