Building a website within SEO best practice guidelines is the first step to getting your site crawled, indexed and ranked by major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.
The important points here to remember are to :
- Submit your URL to the search engine (like this for Google)
- Ensure that your sitemap.xml has been submitted (like this)
These 2 steps ensure that the search engines know that your site is there to be crawled and searched. Once this has been done though it takes a while for the bots to get to your site and actually crawl it.
The process of getting it indexed can take anywhere from between 2 and 4 weeks; but there are a few ways that you can “speed” up this process and take you to the next level.
Ranking, the second step after indexing
Inbound links to your site act as lead ins to your site which Google and other search engines will follow to your site. As soon as they have followed the link and arrived at your site they will begin crawling; indexing and ranking it. Google enjoys finding a website through links as it already confirms popularity of the site (which is closely related to relevancy).
The ranking process is the really important one as this determines where in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) you will show up. Apart from on site optimisation techniques such as title tags, H1 tags, keyword relevancy, code, etc. it is the process of link building and marketing your site that will greatly improve where you rank.
Cementing your site rank with link building
By having your site linked to by other sites which are directly related to your site and in fact in the case of article syndication, to article directory sites that are not directly related to your site. These back links are the cement with which the page rank for your site is built and it is this page rank which ultimately determines where you show up in the SERPS.
JD Consulting is an Online Marketing Consultancy based in Johannesburg Gauteng. For over 10 years we have been assisting our clients with their online strategies from the design of their website through to the marketing online thereof. For more information on how JD Consulting can assist you with our online marketing strategy and implementation needs, contact us on business@jdconsulting.co.za or visit our website at www.jdconsulting.co.za
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Great article. Most of my content on my site and blog is directly linked into social media channels. The fastest time I had a page indexed was 33 minutes through social media. That means the URL is indexed but not necessarily the content with keywords.
In the past I remember waiting for days if not weeks to get sites indexed but it has changed with Web 2.0.
Good article. I would like to add another point. Website speed! 2010 is going to be the year of “fast websites”. Google will rank websites according the speed of a webpage. It won’t be the main factor but G will consider it while ranking. So working on reducing http requests, creating image sprites and moving javascript files to the footer will definitely help making your website faster. We have recently worked heavily on making the website faster and right now my website is loading pages within 5 seconds.
Also, Anton’s point is really good. G seems to delay indexing new pages. I see G indexing our new posts/pages atleast from 1 month to 2 months. Social Networking brings the G bot to your new articles pretty fast.
Regards.