Register your website with Google

and wait patiently. It will take a while until your site appears in the search results, so better register now - it’s quick, painless and free. Here’s the link to add your URL to Google. And here you register your site for free with MSN. Don’t bother with Yahoo - they want money and it’s not worth it. They will pick up your site for free… if you follow the advice below.

Links, links, links

Links are important for two reasons. First, they send you visitors. Second, and at least as important, the number of links which point to your site are interpreted by the search engine as the popularity of your website. Sites with greater popularity (Google talks of ‘PageRank‘) rank higher up in the search results of Google, Yahoo and MSN. How can you get links?

• Ask your friends to link to you
• Participate in online disussions on blogs and forums (many link to your website from your user profile)
• Contact webmasters who might be interested in your site and ask them
• Exchange links with sites about the same or related topics
• Send me an email and I’ll put you a link on this site :-)
• Buy links (very common among professionals and the quickest way to get good ranking but not necessary for hobby sites)

If you have interesting content on your site, people will link to it without being asked. Good content is by far the best way of getting links - but ‘create great content’ is easier said than done.