How to Get Your Site Seen?

It is known within search marketing that Google doesn?t like new websites and that a site has to age significantly before it starts showing up in the search results I have found this to be completely untrue as I have proved that you can get to number 1 in Google in a matter of weeks, in my case it was around 6 weeks

It is known within search marketing that Google doesn?t like new websites and that a site has to age significantly before it starts showing up in the search results. I have found this to be completely untrue as I have proved that you can get to number 1 in Google in a matter of weeks, in my case it was around 6 weeks. But after only a week of being live my site was in position 9 for my chosen keyword!

So how did I do it? Well I built the site using and xhtml and CSS and ensured it was crawler-friendly; I then wrote some really good text and made sure I used H1 tags and Meta data correctly. I basically just followed Google?s advice and I am now reaping the rewards. It only took a week or two before each page got indexed. You might think I spent hours sourcing inbound links or spend hundreds on directory bought links but I didn?t. The site has no link popularity at all. It has just one link from a free directory which was how the site got indexed in the first place.

One thing I did do was research keywords to make sure I wasn?t taking on more than I could chew. It is very difficult to work out what phrases your target market might be searching for. There are some research tools which could help like Wordtraker and Google Adwords and also Yahoo Search marketing data. One way is to ask people you know what they search phrases they would use to find your product or service. When you have chosen some keywords or phrases - test them. Have a look at how many pages are returned and take a closer look at the sites that come up on the front page. If your search phrase brought back over 20 million results then you know you have plenty of competition which might make ranking your site take a lot longer than you want, it might be worth finding another less competitive phrase to target. If however there are under 5 million results you will have a much better chance of ranking on the first page. For search results that have less than 1 million results you should be able to get your site on the front page in a matter of weeks.

A quick way to see results is to buy a domain with your main keywords in. This brings a lot of power to the phrase you?re targeting. The trouble with that is that someone else probably has already done this and bought the domain. But you can always find similar versions. For instance say your target keywords were ?Car Leasing? and carleasing.com and car leasing.co.uk are not available; why not look for carleasinguk.com or carleasinguk.co.uk. This way you are still getting your keywords in the domain and you also getting the added bonus of having the UK word. Obviously this is only useful for sites from the UK, but the same could be done for any country.

Now my site probably wont stay in that top position so I will have to keep working on the site, adding new content and finding links to help with my popularity. Getting a site on the front pages is easy for an experienced SEO specialist like myself, but keeping it there is the hardest thing. You never know what your competitors are up too so you have to keep on your toes. If you want an SEO expert to work on your site take a good look around as there are many sharks out there. Ask to see portfolios of their work and contact those sites if you want to be a hundred percent sure you really have found an SEO expert. Many talk the talk but cant walk the walk.

Carolyn Clayton is an SEO expert offering SEO Consultancy.