It takes time for new sites to be crawled and indexed by search engines, and before people will be able to find your site using the search engine's search box, this will first need to happen. This can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months and unfortunately, is out of our control.
Until your site is indexed, people will be able to find your site by putting your address, such as mysite.com, into the browser window at the very top of the page.
There are some other things that you can do to move the process of getting indexed along:
- Search engines like Google show users the sites that they think the users will find useful. The most important things you can do to ensure your site will be indexed is to create good, informative content and update your site frequently.
- Search engines read text to know the topic of a page and there are three tags that specifically alert the search engine to what a page is about; the title, description and keywords tag. If you click on Page > Page Properties > Metadata, you will find fields to add unique title, description, and keywords tags to each of your pages. Traffic Builder includes an SEO scan, that quickly picks up on missing tags and pinpoints the work that needs to be done to fix them.
- Submitting your site to search engines. This basically alerts the search engines to your site's existence and puts it on a list of sites to be crawled; this of course is no guarantee of inclusion in the search engines index, but is quick to do and could speed the process along. Here are links to submit your site to be crawled to the three major search engines: Google, Bing and Yahoo.
- You can submit your site to Google through a program called Google Webmaster Tools.
- Search engines view sites that have many incoming links (links from other websites) as being more of an authority on a topic. Begin building links to your site by:
- Submitting your website to online directories. Submitting your website to business directories and niche topic directories is a great idea for driving traffic to your site and improving your SEO.
- Submitting informative articles to article directories. When you do this you will be able to put an author bio at the end of the article with a link back to your website, and by putting the article in the article directory you give others permission to reprint your article as long as they include your author bio; this will in turn give you more links back to your site and traffic. Here are a few to get you started: ideamarketers.com, ezinearticles.com and articlealley.com.
- Optimizing your site for local search. If you are a business that depends on local customers, such as a flower shop, an auto body shop or a restaurant, what could be better than coming up right at the top of the search engine results page for a keyword search including your geographic location.
- Network with other webmasters in your industry, topic of interest and local area and offer to do a link exchange.
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