The first step is to go to Google’s “add URL” page here:

http://www.google.com/addurl/

This alone won’t get you indexed. You’ll immediately get a submission confirmation page from Google telling you so.

The second step is to create some reciprocal links to your site to and from websites that are already well-indexed.

A friend of mine started a blog at http://americanconservatism.blogspot.com/

He was immediately concerned when he didn’t get noticed by Google on day two. So I told him about reciprocal links and a few other methods of getting noticed by Google.

Google has always used the number of links from websites, and especially sites that have a lot of traffic, to determine a website’s ranking in their index. The principle is similar to credible citations. For instance, you know if a book has good credibility if it is quoted and cited in a lot of other literature. If a book is quoted in the Encyclopedia Britannica, then it probably has more credibility than if it is quoted in a book using a self-publishing service such as Lulu.com.

You can create your own reciprocal links on pages you create on community user sites such as YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook. If you don’t have accounts on these pages, you can easily create them, put up some good content and then use your blog URL as your listed homepage.

In fact, doing a blog on Facebook or MySpace is a shortcut to being indexed. The problem is that you won’t be able to customize as much it or make money from ad links. It’s not really a blog that you own, but a content generator that makes advertising money for these sites. But if you want readers to come to your own blog, you should do something like the following.

1. Create a YouTube V-Log.
2. Upload some good videos you made.
3. Place a link to your website with the “http://” prefix in the description. (YouTube will automatically read it as a live link.)
4. You can embed your YouTube videos in your blog and also publish links to specific blog entries in your video descriptions on YouTube.
5. You can do the same thing with Facebook, MySpace and dozens of other sites.

That’s just step one and two. Once I press “publish post” (today is 2/10/2008) we should see how fast Adam’s American Conservatism blog gets indexed by Google.

My next post in the series, I’ll explain again how I’ve occassionally broken into the top 100,000 websites and stayed fairly consistent over the past ten years.