I typed in my keywords but my site still didn’t come up on Google!!

Getting ranked for specific keywords can take several months, but there are some ways you can speed this up, and also try to improve your positioning in the index for each of your chosen keywords.  When you add new content to your site, it needs to be crawled by the Googlebots, and since there are also competitors going after the keywords, it’s hard to rise to the top of the SERP’s (search engine results pages).

Organic seo (Search Engine Optimization) techniques (as opposed to paid search marketing) include keyword-rich articles on your site, link building (getting other relevant sites to link to you, as a way to build your Page Rank), and filling out your meta tags for each page on the site.  You can also submit your site to free web directories*, and when those directories get crawled, they will hopefully pass some PR Juice over to your site.

* (not Free For Alls (FFA’s), not link farms, not bad neighborhoods, but 100% quality, honest directories–there are about 200 sites that are known to insiders as being the ones to get listed on, the rest can be ignored safely)

What you need to do is choose your keywords that you want to target (so for example, for my site Webovator.com, ‘Springfield Web Designers’ is a good keyword, because it is 3 words long, and therefore less competitive than a keyword like ‘Web Design’).  (As a side-note, the above link might be more effective if I used the keywords as the actual link text (in the anchor tag), so it would have the same URL as the destination, but it would look like this: Springfield Web Designers.

• Better Adsense Fast
• Free Social Media Traffic Tips

Why is my new site not found in Google / Other Search Engines?

This is a question I hear quite often from clients who may not be especially tech savvy, Web savvy, or whatnot, and it deserves some attention for that reason (future clients may even be reading this so that I don’t have to type it all out in an email).  So take what you can from this article, and feel free to leave comments and add more if you think I have forgotten some key points. (If needed I can devote a future blog entry to your comments/questions.)

Your site is down?  No, it isn’t.

Before we go any further, I should mention that typing your web address (URL) into the search bar is not the same thing as typing it into the address bar.  Just because nothing comes up on Google / Yahoo / Live Search, doesn’t mean the site is offline!  Your site is still public, it just is not available yet through the search engines.  It will be soon, so in the mean time, type the URL in the address bar…you’ll see your site.  And as long as your friends/customers know your domain name, they won’t need to use a search engine, just have them type out the address manually. Keep reading though, and we’ll talk about how we will get your site more visible…

So, when you type in your new (or newly redesigned) web address in a Google search field and hit enter, why do you not see your site listed?  After all, it’s been public for a whole day!

Well, the simple answer is, it doesn’t work like that.  You can’t just throw up a web page (or site) and immediately expect to be listed in the search engines, especially not on the first page!  This could take anywhere from a day to a few months, depending on many factors.  Please be patient with your web designer, as this is not under his/her control, and like with many other things, patience is a virtue.  That said, there are some ways to speed things up, if you need to get indexed as soon as possible (although 99% of my clients always want everything done as soon as possible)…

One good way to get indexed within 24 hours is to open a Google Pages account, and put some content up on your free Google site.  You can bet your bottom dollar it will be indexed almost right away.  Now, all you have to do is link to your other content from that Google page… Boom! Headshot.  Your other site(s) is now crawled and you are listed (although probably not very high yet) in the index.  So you are indexed…now how do you find yourself?  The easiest way is probably to search for your domain name!  So for example, if I want to find webovator.com, I search for webovator.com.  Sounds pretty simple, but not impressive.   It’s okay though, we are making some progress, because we know that we ARE listed, just not for which keywords.  Now we need to figure out how we want people to find us, and use those phrases as our keywords.

• Better Adsense Fast
• Free Social Media Traffic Tips