Well, the answer to this question is an obvious one. Go to google.co.uk (or .com if you are an international visitor), then simply type in your company name.
If your name now shows in the search results then your site has been ‘indexed’.
If you can’t see yourself in the results make sure Google didn’t do this (which is quite common) -
Google decided to search for the phrase it thought you meant.
Ok…. so you have now ascertained that you can’t even find yourself by using your company/domain name. This isn’t good! But it is the easiest thing to fix.
Telling Google You Exist
The great thing about Google, and the other search engines, is that they actually want you to be found ….. they like you. So they have made ‘dashboards’ for you to sign into and submit your website.
Obviously you will need an account to use them, free of course.
Once inside these ‘toolboxes’ you can add your domain name to a box labelled ‘Add New Site’ and then you need to do something a little complex but highly worthwhile. You need to submit a XML site map.
About Sitemaps (from Google’s website)
Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover. In its simplest terms, a XML Sitemap—usually called Sitemap, with a capital S—is a list of the pages on your website. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google’s normal crawling process.
If you are using a website made with Joomla or WordPress for example there are ways for you to have your sitemap built automatically. If not then you can go here – Free Sitemaps – and they’ll do it for you, free.
So, we now have our sitemap but we need to put it somewhere the search engines can find it. Using a FTP program or using the file manager program on your server you will need to put the sitemap in the ‘root’ directory (the folder where the website sits). It is this ‘location’ or ‘address’ that you then tell the search engines. For example, this site would be – impalawebdesign.com/sitemap.xml
The above ‘work’ for any size site should take a web developer less than an hour!
Conclusion. The above steps will get the search engines to ‘crawl’ your domain name and find your website so that you will be found when someone searches for your domain/company name. However, please be warned, this is just the tip of the iceberg, you now need to read “Do My Customers Know I Exist?”
TIP. The above steps can be done multiple times. So every time you make a new website have it submitted the same way.