2.4. Index Your Site with Search Engines

It can take a number of weeks for Google and the other search engines to index your site in the search results. 

To speed up this process, you can submit your website to Google manually: http://www.google.com/addurl:

Once you are indexed, the next step is to get ranked in the results.  Popular keywords, such as "auto parts", are very difficult to rank highly for compared to more targeted/niche keywords like "auto parts dealer in San Francisco".  There are many factors that search engines use to rank websites.  In fact, there is an entire field dedicated to this topic called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Here are the basics to SEO:

- Choose targeted, niche keywords for your website.  Your most important keywords should be part of your domain (ex. autoparts.weebly.com).  In addition, you want to mention the keywords in the content of the website numerous times to show that they are significant, particularly in titles.  However, avoid "keyword stuffing".

- The best way to increase your search engine ranking is to get incoming links to your website from websites with a related subject matter.  If the incomming links have the text you are trying to rank for as the "anchor text" of the link, it will help you to rank higher for that search term.  For example, you can see that Weebly ranks well for the search term "free website" because we have a lot of incoming links to our site using the words "free website" in the link.

- Include a descriptive title and meta keywords (available under the "settings" tab).  Meta keywords are no longer of much importance to search engines due to abuse and attempts to game the system.  However, the meta description is still important because it is the text people will see in the search listings and could have a big impact on whether they click through or not.