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Google in 1998, showing the original logo

Last month, a client called to say he still hadn’t seen his web site appear in Google‘s listings. The web site had been up one week.

That just goes to show you how much we all expect instantaneous results from anything Internet-related. But that’s not the way it is, and it won’t be for quite some time.

Now, it’s possible that my client’s web site could have made it into Google within a week. I’ve had it happen, but ONLY with web sites that have a longstanding domain name (I redesigned my sister’s web site, Colonial Photography, and she was sitting pretty on page 1 the next day (where she’s remained) — she’d owned her URL for 12 years.) Google respects longevity.

Here are some important things to remember about your new web site being found on Google:

1. The older your domain name, the faster you’ll climb the ranks.

2. Google spiders don’t “crawl” every web site every day, or every week for that matter. Google performs “fresh” crawls periodically looking for brand new stuff. But Google only performs a “deep” crawl every month, on some undetermined date (but one you can make an educated guess about if you watch closely). And, depending on a lot of factors, you may not see the results of even a deep crawl for six weeks or so. Also, Google is under no obligation to deep crawl your site at all. If your site remains unimproved for long periods of time, it’s likely that it will take some energy to get Google’s attention again.

So, here are some tips for getting found by Google faster:

1. Keep an “old” URL (but not the web site) even if you’re changing your business name. Ask your webmaster to redirect the old URL to the new. It will pay off.

2. Revise your file names. Make sure they use your keywords, and aren’t too long. Google will overlook file names that appear to be similar. I’ll give you an example. Before I knew any better, I used to add the business name to the keywords for a file name — both so the business name could be better branded and the web file names could be better organized (e.g., businessname_web_site_design.html and businessname_copywriting.html). You may find that Google will bypass any page other than your home (index) page if you do this. Keep your most important key words near the front of the file name, and make sure they’re also used in your body text.

3. Increase the volume of your inbound links. Two otherwise identical sites will rank differently in Google based on their popularity with the world at large — particularly their peers. You can’t do any better than being linked to by people in your own business. So — make sure you’re listed in online trade directories, blog directories (you do have a blog, don’t you?), and the like. The more the merrier. Just don’t pay a “link farm” to generate random links to your web site. When Google sees that these links are bogus, you’ll be penalized.

4. Drive traffic to your web site. Blog, answer questions on LinkedIn, even advertise on Google or Facebook. Just get people to your web site. This is harder than it may sound — people want interesting and useful information. Can you provide it?

5. As often as possible, freshen your web site’s content. Particularly the index page. Add new files. Add downloadables. Add a new blog entry.

6. Lather, rinse, repeat. It sometimes takes perseverance and consistent nurturing to gain a higher ranking on Google, but you can make great strides if you’re persistent and patient.

After about a month, my client’s web site appeared on Google, on page 1 for both of his top key words, and his was a brand-new domain. It will take him longer to reach page 1 for a much more competitive key word, but I have confidence that in his market area we will demonstrate more perseverance than his competition. I’ll let you know how we do.

Oh, what is the Google dance? If you watch search engine results pages (SERPs) rankings daily, as I do, you’ll see that your web pages’ rankings will jockey around quite a bit — up by three points here, and down by one there. That’s the dance to pay attention to.

Other reading:

Timing Google’s crawl

How Google works

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Tags: Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Search Engines

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 14th, 2010 at 1:50 pm and is filed under Marketing, Search engine optimization (SEO). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.