One of the most frequent questions I get when I give presentations in the Denver metro area is "Does Google even know that my website exists?".

There are a lot of frustrated small business owners who type in search terms related to their business.  But unfortunately, their business website doesn't appear in the search results.

Fortunately, there is a fairly easy way to find out if Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft do in fact know that your website exists.  All search engines have unique indexes.  A search engine index is where search engines store all of the information that they collect when they crawl the web.  In order for your site to appear on a search engine results page, your website must first be within the search engine index for a given search engine.  By performing an advanced web search, you can find out whether or not the search engines know that your small business website is out there.

For Google and Yahoo, the advanced operator to use is "site:"

For Microsoft, the command is "url:"

The screencast for this blogpost is titled "Does Google Even Know My Website Exists?".  It provides step by step instructions on how to use these advanced search commands, and how to interpret the results.