how do i get my domain name to come up on a google search?

Hi d brooks,
For that you need to do search engine optimisation. There are very good articles at www.searchenginewatch.com which would help you in that. The starting point is choose the appropriate keywords in your Title tag and on your website. For example. your site is about Furnitures, and if you want your website to appear on the first page of Google when someone searches for Teak Furniture. This keyword should be present in your website. That was just an example.
You need to build up your link popularity as well with the websites of related content.
The Anchor text which you use for linking should also contain relevant keywords

thank you....this helps out alot

http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

Yes! You can add your site to Google. However it can find a particular website even if it is not submited there. You have to optimize your website's meta tags. This way Search engines will recognize it.

Best Regards
D.

About submitting and getting indexed on Google, that's explained above. To check if your domain is listed at Google just enter "yourdomain. .com" at Google.

Originally posted by d brooks
how do i get my domain name to come up on a google search?

There are 3 separate things to consider: i) getting Google to index your site, ii) optimizing your site's content, and, iii) getting other sites to link to you to improve your positioning.

If you submit your site to Google using the link suggested by chrisxx then it should be indexed within a couple of weeks. If you get someone with an existing site that is already indexed by Google to link to you then you may be able to get your site indexed by Google within a couple of days (because Google should follow the link to your site next time it indexes the other site).

Being in Google's index simply means that Google knows your site exists and has cached its content. Even if your content is relevant and you have lots of sites linking to you then do not expect your site to show in Google's search results for 2 - 3 months. Google has a habit of waiting to see if your site is long-lived before it starts returning it as a search result (sometimes called the Google sandbox).

One of the best ways of improving your position in search results is to get your site entered in the Open Directory. The problem is it can take a loooooooong time for that to happen. I submitted a site to the OD for inclusion over 18 months ago and still nothing!

If your site has good content then PM me the URL and I will link to you from one of my sites to help you get indexed quickly.

Moved to the 'Web Design and Content' forum.

Google is a challenging beast these days and not by any means easy to even get a new site indexed. One new thing they have that could help are their SiteMaps. You have to sign up for a SiteMap account with Google and then basically invite their crawler to come and index your site (by way of an .xml file you put into the root of your site).

In my experience, the results are mixed, but it's worth spending time learning about this, as I think Google is getting overwhelmed by the sheer number of sites on the Net and is now saying, "If you want your content indexed, you must let us know."