SEO Blog

You’ve taken the plunge, you’ve developed a website, but nothing’s happening. You can’t find yourself on search engines, you’re getting no traffic, it’s a disaster! Don’t panic. Your hard work isn’t going to waste, you just need to have a little patience and do a little extra work.

It’s a remarkably common set of circumstances. Some individuals and businesses expect the Internet to provide instant magical results. They want to be ranking on the first page of Google’s SERPs and to have hoards of targeted traffic flooding to their homepage. Surprisingly, they end up disappointed.

Even a website that has had professional development, can take time to become visible. Whilst you can apply to be included within Google, Yahoo and Bing, this often won’t speed up the process all that much. All you need to do is wait for your site to get indexed. This is where the search engine spiders go through the pages of a website, find out what they relate to and then rank it for those perceived key terms.

Not until you’re fully indexed will you appear within the search engine results pages. This can take hours, days or even longer, but it will happen. To help it along you might want to improve your inbound linking structure. By getting other websites and directories to link to you, your site will have more entrance points for the spiders and your potential customers. Exactly what you need to get indexed, improve your ranking (when indexed) and to start getting people through you virtual doors.

You may also want to make sure that your navigation is also cohesive and allows for straightforward indexing. For example, you don’t want any links from your homepage going out to a secondary site (unless they are properly nofollowed) as this may lead the spider away from your site and prevent it from fully indexing pages. A sitemap is also a useful way of guiding the search engine crawler through the maze of pages on a website. These are easy to set up and will also provide a useful resource for human visitors too.

Whilst initial rankings can be reasonable, don’t be too deterred if you’re nowhere near the top of the search engine results for your key terms. There will be sites out there who have invested a great deal of time developing their SEO and link building; this means that they are in a far stronger position and it will take time to be able to challenge them.

Another thing that will probably be against you is the age of your domain. Older URLs are ascribed greater relevance by search engine algorithms. Whilst new sites can make good progress and even get to the top, it should be noted that age is a factor.

SEO will help you get noticed and improve your rankings once you’re up and running, but don’t expect an instantaneous reaction. There’s no way of forcibly making a search engine index your site, it just requires a little patience and effort on your part.