There are many sites out there saying how to get your site indexed in less then one hour, or even less than 20 min. I will write about quick indexing in my next post, but for now I will write about getting your page indexed for the first time. It is not that important what kind of a host you use. But when it comes to submitting your page to some catalogues, paid host have the priority. Some of the catalogues have restrictions on sites that are hosted for free which is not nice if you are starting your site without spending a cent.
To get your page indexed for the first time you have to submit it to search engines so that Google, Yahoo, MSN Search know that your page is out there. Submitting your page to "index" is nothing else than adding your page to Google or other search engine catalogue. So Google can only find pages that are indexed ("in catalogue"), that why submiting your page to search engines is so important. Enough said, lets start.
Search engines submit pages:
Google
Yahoo
Live Search - MSN
To get your site indexed can take from few hours to 2-3 weeks. The most important thing is that your site has some traffic and links pointing at it. The easiest way to get some traffic and links is to add your page to catalogue. The best known catalogue is DMOZ, getting your site in to the catalogue will get you hundreds when not thousands of new visitors. For other catalogues you have to look your self. Add your page and wait patiently.
If you want to check if your page is already indexed yo can type something like this in: site:www.example.com in every search engine. When it does not return any of the pages from your site you still have to wait.
The other important thing is to set your permissions on your host for search engines robots, that do crawl your web page.
If you have a blog on blogger you can add a META line saying that all robots are allowed. This line looks like this:
META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="FOLLOW" - this will let robots to crawl every post on your blog
To gain some more control on indexing can apply for special services (Free), from Google and Yahoo.
Yahoo Site Explorer - Yahoo E-mail required
Google Webmaster Tools - E-mial required
Those services let you know if Yahoo or Google had some problems accessing your site, will tell you if your robots permissions are correctly set and when was your page last visited by a robot. You can also remove some pages out of Googles index, which is very helpful when a page with private data will be indexed and easily available for everyone using Google.
Google has a large set of Tools that will make your life easier:
Analytics will let you see all the statistics for your page, count of visitors, links that are leading to your site and much more.
