Ranking as Quickly as Possible With a New Site
By Michael Stearns/Vanessa Salvia
The day your new website launches is an exciting one! You have likely already spent many months developing your content, design, and functionality. For most site owners, the next logical and important step is to consider how your new site will be found by the world of Internet users. Having search engines index your site and rank it highly is a process that takes time, planning, and systematic effort.
Achieving high search engine rankings is a realistic goal for most websites. However, it won't happen right away, and it will involve taking specific steps to help the search engines fully index your site and view your web pages as having value and authority.
If you are vying for less competitive search terms, you should allow three-four months to start gaining good traction in the search engines. For more competivie terms, you should realistically allow for six months to a year to pass before a site begins to rank well in the "organic," or free, search listings of the major search engines.
We see new sites getting ranked pretty quickly for non-competitive terms, so you don't have to wait for months before being ranked in Google, but, a new site is competing with sites that may have been online and building their keywords and links for years, so it's unlikely for a search engine to view a new site as being as highly relevant as an older, trusted site.
Certainly the time period can be lessened and we recommend taking a comprehensive approach to building your search engine exposure. While you are waiting for the organic listings, you should be considering a comprehensive strategy that will help drive traffic over the long term.
Here is the path we recommend following:
1. Goal Setting: Create Your Top-10 List of Search Phrases
Set realistic goals of important phrases that you want to get top placement for. Research the competition to gauge how difficult top placement will be. Often, the most general terms may be the keywords most difficult to rank highly for, such as "yoga products," or "soccer balls." These terms return a large number of search results, which represents a very competitive landscape. Narrowing down to something more specific can be more fruitful, such as "nonslip yoga mats" or "leather soccer balls."
2. Consider Who Is Going To Do Your SEO Work
If you are a HEROweb customer, you have three main options for implementing the search marketing-related tasks:
- You can do many, if not all of the tasks we suggest below if you have the time and a modest amount of technical aptitude.
- HEROweb can do the initial SEO implementation and optimization of your website.
- You can work with a firm that specializes in Internet Marketing.
3. Set up a Google Analytics Account 
First things first, you absolutely need an analytics program. Open a Google Analytics account (or some other stats package), and understand how to integrate your site with Google Analytics ecommerce. Run the analytics package for two weeks to gather some information about where your visitors are coming from before taking any action. Without PPC or product feeds or something beyond the organic search, it's likely that you won't see meaningful stats right away, but get the analytics up and running to begin tracking your progress.
Use this info to develop some keywords, perhaps beyond the initial keyword research you have already done.
4. Take advantage of Google Webmaster Tools and other Diagnostic Tools
Each search engine offers free tools for site owners, and setting this up is an important step for getting started:
Google: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
MSN/Live: http://webmaster.live.com
These tools help you troubleshoot, view the indexed pages on your site, when your site was last crawled, and view statistics about your site.
Also mention that each engine has a sitemap function that you can use to submit a "sitemap" of your site.
5. Develop a Sensible Search Engine Optimization strategy
There are a number of resources online for Do-It-Yourself SEO. Here's one primer: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-beginners-checklist-for-small-business-seo
This list looks daunting, but SEO can be essentially boiled down to:
- Developing the content on each page of your site so it is optimized for specific keywords, with these terms reflected in the title and in the copy of the pages
- Creating a site that inspires others to link to it.
The most successful SEO strategy involves developing the content of your pages so that it is the most relevant that it can be to users searching for the keywords that you are optimizing for. Actively develop good content and build it slowly and steadily.
Trying to compete against established sites for their top keywords will be a frustrating exercise. Target all of your important phrases, including the less popular keywords, to build your base. But just realize the harder terms might take longer to get top listings for, after your site has aged well and developed trust.
6. Increase Link Popularity
Building incoming links and site authority are very important and take time. Google values quality incoming links, which is one reason why new sites with few or no links do not rank well. Avoid rapidly obtaining large numbers of incoming links in an effort to inflate your rankings. This can be highly detrimental in the long-term, as Google views this as a spammy tactic and would de-list even an established site that did this. Focus on a long-term overall Internet marketing strategy and look beyond just quickly getting high organic listings for a few key terms.
Try this:
* Each week, pitch a handful of bloggers within your industry to write about your new site.
* Submit an article to Sphinn, Stumble Upon, Del.icio.us, or Digg that links to your new site.
* Submit your site to directories.
* Submit a press release to PR sites. Include a video or link to some other multimedia content for an even more powerful presentation.
* Create a handful of articles each week and submit them to article directories, with a link back to your site, of course.
* Create a social media profile on a popular site, such as Facebook. Consider LinkedIn and Twitter. Even if you aren't ready to start using them heavily, you can at least link to your site. A Squidoo lens (www.squidoo.com) takes only about 15 minutes to create.
When courting reciprocal links from related sites, keep an eye on the quality of the site, and not the quantity of links. Have fun and be creative with link-building, but be sensible.
7. Analyze your competition
Keep an eye on what your competition is doing and how they are ranking. Don't copy them, but you don't want to be the last one to know about some big change they've made.
8. Set up a Google Product Listing Ads (for Ecommerce)
The Google Product Feed can be an effective source of paid traffic for Ecommerce sites. A feed automatically submits your product catalog information to Google, making it easier for online shoppers to find you. While the , like most other Google services, and produces very good results for ecommerce sites. Google reports a product title, price, and your company name, so this could be a good way to stand apart from the competition, especially if you have a better price point or a more relevant name.
9. Start a PPC campaign
PPC is not within every site owner's budget, but it can be an important part of a comprehensive online marketing strategy. Paying for Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising can help a new site gain traffic while waiting for organic rankings to take effect. When you start to see more organic traffic, then back off on the PPC. But for a new site, the Catch-22 may be that there is no budget for advertising until some traffic starts coming in! Targeting the less popular version of some keywords is less expensive. Choose more "long tail" keywords that your competition may be ignoring. Even if the search volume is smaller, you will get more interested hits if you rank well for a less popular term than you will for being pushed down the pages for a top-volume keyword.
You might not have much to go on, but if you gathered any analytic info from the stats package, use that to set up a campaign. You can limit how much you want to spend. After a couple weeks of this campaign, you should have a better idea of what keywords produce the most clicks for your ads. This will in turn help you optimize your site for the most productive keywords.
10. Go beyond Google
Google, Bing, and Yahoo bring the lion's share of web traffic. And within the big three, most of the traffic comes from Google. So focusing your efforts on Google is a good place to start.
However, a new site may be slow to rank on Google but may get picked up much more quickly on Bing or Yahoo, so don't ignore the search engine optimization that works on these alternative search engines.
For businesses that have a local audience, make sure your business is listed in Google's Local Business Center. When people search for your industry in your area, your listing can pop up. With a Google AdWords account, you can create a local business ad with results which include your business as a map marker.
11. Start a Blog
Share your enthusiasm about your new site, invite responses in comments, host some sort of contest, poll, or give-away. You won't start a blog and have loads of customers magically appear, but it is a great way to get links back to your site and give Google more to "do" when it visits your site. Google loves to see relevant content slowly and steadily appearing.
Or, if you put the blog on your site, it is a great way to build pages that have keywords and improve your site in the eyes of the search engines.
12. Consider all Options
There are a range of other strategies for driving traffic to your site. These include:
* Comparison shopping engines
* Affiliate programs
* Video promotion of your product or services
* Press Releases
There is a lot more to web marketing than just search optimizing your site and getting listed highly in Google. All of these can be part of a comprehensive strategy.
Summary
The web is no longer a "get rich quick" frontier. It takes time and considerable patience to develop stable, permanent sources of backlinks and a customer base. It takes time to become established in organic search listings, but there are many other pieces that can be put into place while your initial work on optimization and link building is taking effect. A quick fix today could be detrimental to your future success, so tough as it sounds, have patience, and work on it a little at a time.
