Everyone who does SEO knows the drill for a new website

This seems to be the bare bones minimum needed to get the website some visibility. But what's not really known by a lot of webmasters, or is at least ignored a lot, is the ability to get Google to crawl the site by adding it manually to the index. Sort of.

I say sort of because experiments have shown that regardless of the age of the domain (it can be a new domain registered today), one way to kick in the spider is by creating an account for yourself with Google, and then adding your site from within the account.

To get Google to verify that the site can be spidered, you then can upload an html file with a certain name (which google tells you) or add a meta tag to your home page. Both are fairly easy options and can be done in minutes. Once this is done, the google spider visits your site and the home page is spidered. Of course if there is good content on the page, and links going to other sites, those end up in the index somewhere too.

This does not mean of course that the site is ready to be served to users from Google searches. In fact, after the spider's first crawl, your cannot see it if you type site:www.sitename.com in google search box. But it does become available about 3-4 days later. I have seen this now with over 100 websites which followed the same path.

From domain registration date to the first visibility in Google, it can be safely assumed to be about a week. From then onwards, google can then see how many other domains link to this domain from its own exisiting index of sites. Experiments showed that the sites which had the most incoming links made within the first week of registration got the spider to crawl it most frequently. Makes sense when you consider that Google should be giving weight to a new website where many others are willing to link to it. Of course the sites linking to it should also be of good quality (I will go into that in my later articles).

Moral of the story: If you are looking to jumpstart your site with google, at a minimum add some basic content and add it to google by creating an account with them.