How to Get Your Pages Indexed by ASK in Five Simple Steps

This Video Will Change Your Life

Targeted Traffic

Wordpress Themes

How to Get Your Pages Indexed by ASK in Five Simple Steps

If you have been looking on your statistics lately, one think you will notice is that among the leading search engines, for most webmasters, ASK will not only be the last but also the one search engine that will have the least number of your pages indexed and included on their database.

On my last post, titled “don’t submit your Url to the following search engines” I did tell you that I was going to give you a simple trick that you can use to pump up the number of your pages on ASK. Well here we are. Below are five simple tips that you can use to have more pages on ASK.

• Prepare your sitemap.

First of all start by understanding how to register your site/URL with Ask so that it will be indexed. In summary, according to ASK help section for webmasters and I quote:

We appreciate your interest in having your site listed on Ask.com and the Ask.com search engine. Your best bet is to follow the open-format Sitemaps protocol, which Ask.com supports.

Once you have prepared a sitemap for your site, add the sitemap auto-discovery directive to robots.txt, or submit the sitemap file directly to us via the ping URL. (For more information on this process, see Does Ask.com support sitemaps?) Please note that sitemap submissions do not guarantee the indexing of URLs.

• Second prepare your robots.txt file.

Going by the phrase - robots.txt, the phrase might sound too technical, but it is really not that hard at all. So how do you create your own robot.txt file? Relax, you can do it:

1. Learn how to create a robot.txt file
2. Check and validate your robot.txt file

• Third, write useful content.

You will want to search in forums and other online places, identify questions and problems that people are experiencing. Then create a useful post or page that addresses how to or “ask a question” as your title for that page/post and then proceed to create and provide a useful feedback that answers or helps out by solving the problem or issue at hand.

• Fourth, Get links.

Just like on number three above, once you create your page, head back to the forums, yahoo answers, blogs or any other online community place and then briefly provide feedback to those questions and problems that are related to the page you just created. If possible link back to your page using your pages title anchor text. You may also want to internally link to your page from another of your post.

• Last; be patient.

Form it the habit of repeating one through four above by occasionally creating more “how to” and “ask a question” posts. Then wait. Be patient. With time you will sure have ASK indexing more of your pages.

Let me also point out that one interesting thing that I have noticed by watching my site statistics and this is not new; How to and ask questions type of posts tend to attract the most traffic and interest when compared to most of the other regular pages.

Therefore this is going to be a win-win situation, you will not only be creating useful pages on your site that your visitors are going to love and find interesting and useful but also with time, you will have your pages indexed by the search engines - even ASK that seems to take a while before they come knocking.