Quickly ranking on search engines like Google

So you just created the best website on the planet, not only featuring a cutting edge visual design, but also penned by the modern equivalent of Shakespeare.

You followed all the rules and it interesting and relevant. Two month on you still have no traffic and worse still Google wont index it.

How search engines work

With the terms world wide web, spiders, crawlers and bots, it’s easy to think the internet was created by oversized geeks, who’s fixation with science fiction and fantasy trumps the need for something practical.

But the truth is really the opposite and really theses jargon names mealy mirror the function of these terms.

Although we could use more jargon, World Wide Web (or the web) is a term that expresses the idea of interlinked items (or pages) and a spider or crawler follows these links to find its prey (the website pages)

So in short a spider/crawler is a piece of code which follows links on websites to find other pages.

Google then takes all this information, organises, sorts and then display this information depending on your personal search requirements.

That’s great but I’m still not ranked

So for a new website the challenge is to lay the threads to allow the spiders and crawlers to find us.

So the first way is to use Google Webmaster service to ‘tell’ Google any time your website changes.

And to be honest regardless if you’re ranking or not, the ability to tell Google anytime something has changed is a great idea. So no matter what the spiders and crawlers are doing, you are on their lists of sites to crawl.

The second way which in some ways more important is to make sure you have inbound links coming to your website.

The more sites which link to you, the more times a spider will come and visit.

Getting banned (when backlinks go wrong)

Before you spend thousands on buying building links, there is a caveat. In short link building is against Google’s T+C’s. Google are constantly looking for ways to detect unnatural ranking techniques and as inbound links are a major ranking factor, this will always be an area of abuse.

So the rule of thumb is that if all the inbound links have the same anchor, or you suddenly get more links then you would normally do, you could become under Google Spotlight. In addition Google considers the reputation of your website, so if you have always played by the rules, dodgy links will not be treated the same as if your domain has only just been registered.

Fantastic, but I’m still not ranking

In short Google does not have to take account of inbound links, it chooses to do so, so many places where you build links, Google will just ignore out of hand.

There are a few places where links will help with ranking and in short its social media.

All the major social networking sites will help with link building. The only caveat is that for a link to be seen its needs to be in a ‘public place’.

So for Facebook this means if you’re posting to your timeline and privacy is rigged so only your friends can see your posts, this means Google won’t see you either.

Facebook business pages do not have the same issue, but Google needs to be aware of your page, so if you are thinking of this route, some Facebook marketing could be the way to go.

Platforms like Twitter and YouTube also are public facing, so Google will pick up any links posted.

Remember these links are not going to help raise your rank, but are a method to help Google index you site.

How many links?

In short you need two inbound links Google trusts for your website to be indexed.

Although more links, means quicker indexing as we have already discussed, if you overcook it too quickly it can go massively wrong.

How quickly should I see myself indexed on Google?

For most sites, expect a page to be indexed within a month. For sites with a good reputation and lots of backlinks, the indexing process can be less than a day.

I have personally seen pages indexed in ten minutes before.

Nothing is still working

For people in this situation it can be incredibly frustrating, with the feeling that everyone is doing betting that yourself.

In truth, there may be reasons why things are not working and if you have worked through the above with little success, it’s time to call in the professionals.

It does not need to be expensive and if you’re running a business, it can save you a fortune in lost sales.