So, you’ve just spent your hard earned on a (hopefully) shiny new website, and it’s time for the search engines to start sending visitors through to your website, right?
“I’ll just navigate to my favourite search engine, tap in a term that is related to my company and shazam! ”
Nothing.
And worst of all? It’s a list of less good competitors with rubbish websites and a bunch of unrelated services.
Time to put your expectation management hat on, and here’s why.
Search Engines (i.e. Google) are not the internet. They are websites.
Google (and Yahoo, Bing etc) have done a smashing job of becoming a first stop online for almost everyone, but fundamentally a search engine is a commercial online service that make money by helping people find their way around the internet (through selling advertising). Whilst their agendas are fiercely commercial they are still reasonably complimentary to the needs of owners of good quality websites.
The agendas of search engines are heavily influenced by spammers.
In life and business, lots of money is made by understanding rules and exploiting loopholes (see any lawyer, tax accountant or benefit cheat for more info). The world of search engines are no different. They were created using rules intended to support the successful exposure of good quality information, and inevitably these rules were flaunted and abused by people who wanted to make money with rubbish websites. This abuse happened to such an extent that search engines now find it hard to trust what new websites have written on them. One way of overcoming this barrier is by having trusted and established websites link to your website. This is like a vote of credbility. The more votes of credibility you receive, the more confident a search engine will be to trust your content and suggest your website to it’s visitors.
(please note: any good idea you may have to get links artificially has already been thought of by spammers and search engines alike…don’t bother unless you really know this industry)
So to get to the point…when is your website going to show up in Google?
Well, if you just use the “site submit” services that the search engines offer, it can take many weeks to get your site reviewed (crawled) and, even when it has been reviewed, there is no guarantee that your site will be in the top 100 results for any given search term.
If you can get some links from established websites, you can get reviewed in just days (or sooner), and you are much more likely to appear more highly in the results.
But it’s very hard to get links from popular and established websites (which is kind of the point). So you can make a choice:
1) Sit and wait for your website to be found
or
2) Get out there and start building links to your website.
- Mention your website in discussion groups (don’t spam them!)
- Ask related websites to give you a link (don’t spam them!)
- Call in favours from old companies and contacts who have websites (spam away!)
- List your website on web directories
- You can provide articles to related websites
- You can do something newsworthy which will get your website mentioned around the net
- You can start a blog and compliment or insult some of your industry peers
There are lots of ways to get links back to your website. As a rule, the ones that are provided by third parties for just a few (hundred) pounds with almost no effort on your part are a total waste of time, however good the rhetoric.