So your brand new website is up and running, but nobody knows about it. You need visitors. If you are looking for a product or a dating site, where would you start? Most likely at Google. You need to get your website indexed. Google has programs which are called spiders. These are crawling every link they find, analyze it, and create a priority list (I will mention PageRank later). You will need a sitemap of your site.
Go to
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ and follow the instructions on it. Then download your sitemap, and upload it to your hosting account.
Now search Google Webmaster Tools and register. You will have to confirm that the website is yours, the steps are simple and clear provided by Google. Then click on my website and sitemap, fill in the sitemap.xml's location, and submit. Also, click on settings, and set your target location, and prefered domain (www or non-www). Depending on which you have selected, go to your hosting account, File Manager, and edit the ".htaccess" file. If you prefer the www name, copy and paste this code below the two lines of the default htaccess file:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]
If you like the non-www style more, copy paste this code:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^my-domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://my-domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
write your domain instead of "my-domain.com"
Now just sit back, and wait until Google indexes your site. Oh I mean, go on with the next tutorial!