We receive this question almost daily. People build a nice new website and know it's important to be ranked high in the search engines, but how can someone tell how long it's actually going to take?
Google and other search engines have complex algorithms which determine what site gets ranked first (and second, third, etc.) for any particular search. The search engines don't inform the public of what they use to rank sites because let's face it, if they did, everybody would be ranked #1 for whatever they wanted, and it would detract from the relevance of the results. Imagine searching for a new car dealer and the first 20 pages of results were for credit card offers. If that were the case, not many people would use the search engine anymore because it doesn't give them the results they expect.
The truth is, there are too many factors to consider when trying to figure out how long it will take a site to be indexed by a search engine. Sometimes our clients sign up for a website and if they have unrealistic expectations, they'll call us a week after their site goes live and ask why they aren't the #1 search result for "used cars". At the time of writing this post, that search yields more than 235 million results on Google, so why should ABC Autos be #1 out of 235 million?
Our best advice is to be patient, while at the same time ensuring the site is set up to be indexed as best as possible. This means you should have a sitemap to help the search engines find every page of your site. Do you have content on your pages? A website with no content is pretty much worthless, therefore the search engines won't rank it very high. After all, the crawlers "read" the content to help determine what the site is all about so they know when to include it in their search results. The site should also follow some standard guidelines. Google has made available a very handy document for beginners which can be found here.
With a little patience and using documented strategies (and likewise avoiding similarly documented "bad" strategies), you can typically have a site indexed within a month or two, and over time the ranking will increase for keywords that your site targets.
Sponsored by:
the #1 Provider of Car Salesman Websites and Dealership Sites
Please note that comment moderation is being used on this blog. This means that you are free to comment on any posts, however they will be reviewed prior to being posted on the live site. We welcome any legitimate comments, but comments including links to your own sites (i.e. "link spamming" or "comment spam") will be marked as spam and will not be published. If you have comments that will be useful to other readers, feel free to post them, otherwise go spam someone else's blog!
No comments:
Post a Comment