How to add your site to Google's search results

Inclusion in Google's search results is free and easy. Google says that you don't even need to submit your site to Google because Google is a fully automated search engine that uses software known as "spiders" to crawl the web on a regular basis and find sites to add to their index. They say that the majority of sites listed in their results aren't manually submitted for inclusion, but found and added automatically when our spiders crawl the web.

To determine whether your site is currently included in Google's index, just perform a search for your site's URL. For example, a search for [ site:www.google.com ] returns the following results: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.google.com+

Although Google crawls billions of pages, it's inevitable that some sites will be missed. When our spiders miss a site, it's frequently for one of the following reasons:

• The site isn't well connected through multiple links to other sites on the web.
• The site launched after Google's most recent crawl was completed.
• The design of the site makes it difficult for Google to effectively crawl its content.
• The site was temporarily unavailable when we tried to crawl it or we received an error when we tried to crawl it. You can use Google Webmaster Tools to see if we received errors when trying to crawl your site.

Google says that it's intent is to "represent the content of the internet fairly and accurately". To help make this goal a reality, they offer guidelines as well as tips for building a crawler-friendly site. Following these guidelines should increase your site's chances of showing up in our search results.

Google also recommends creating and submitting a detailed Sitemap of your pages. Sitemaps are an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the Google index and get detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google. With Sitemaps, you can automatically keep us informed of all of your current pages and any updates you make to those pages. Please note that submitting a Sitemap doesn't guarantee that all pages of your site will be crawled or included in our search results.