SEO Blog

Search engine rankings aren’t created by pure chance. Google and Bing have sophisticated algorithms designed to provide the most accurate and authoritative listings. The information is fed back to them by ‘spiders’, which are simply robots that quickly crawl a website looking for keyword relevance.

The combination of a domain’s authority and a page’s relevance is therefore critical to where it ends up in the rankings. However there are many other things that you need to do in order to the grease the wheels of indexing, particularly if you are a new site or generally have to wait weeks to have changes show up in Google.
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When you first start optimising a website you could be forgiven for thinking that your efforts were entirely in vain. More often than not you won’t see any noticeable changes in your online visibility for days, maybe even weeks.

However, the stronger your site becomes, the quicker this process will become.

Take an objective look at it for a moment. Google is good at tracking down new content, however it is already dealing with millions of other new pages on other sites each day. If your site is relatively fresh you might not even have slipped onto their radar yet. You might, for all intents and purposes, be invisible.
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In the old days you’d expect that the obvious answer to this was to continually submit your site to the search engines and you’d be away. Sadly not only was this not very time effective, it just wasn’t very effective full-stop.

Once Google got around to processing your request you were probably about ready to send another one. Now you can save yourself the bother.

Whilst you might still choose to submit your site at the outset, that is probably enough. There are far more effective way for you to get the attention of search engines today, the most effective being strong links and your Webmaster Tools Account. Let’s see how both work.
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You’ve probably been on no end of sites that proudly display the W3C compliant badge. This means that their pages are free from HTML errors and meet the standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium.

Well la-di-da I hear you saying. So what if they have clean code, all it achieves is a small little badge that they can put at the bottom of the page – hardly a way of getting more traffic. To rip off another film, ‘we don’t need no stinking badges!’

Fair point, but being W3C compliant is far more than just a badge, it is a sign that you have a site that is clear from coding errors. Even the smallest HTML issue or unused Javascript can slow down your page load time. Just as concerning, search engine spiders won’t be able to crawl your pages as efficiently; this can lead to them misinterpreting your keywords and not indexing as many pages on your site.
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I won’t need to tell you how important content is to search engine rankings. As one of the two major factors, alongside links, content gives your site focus and it also provides vital contextualisation.

Whilst having content on every page of a site is ideal, it can become tired and worn over time. This is noticed not only by frequent visitors but by the search engines too. If there is nothing new on a site to index, the search engine spiders won’t visit. If you don’t get the search engine spiders crawling your pages, then what hope for improved rankings?

Of course you don’t want to be chopping and changing your content constantly. This would be impractical and wouldn’t necessarily have the desired result. But the occasional spruce up can always pay dividends.
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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.
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