Anyone who has released a website has come to that first glorious moment when your first site goes online. Then, comes the realization that no one knows about your site at all. You may have a few visitors to your site that first day, those will be your friends and colleges that you probably told "hey I put out this great website, come and check it out".
After the initial rush, you will need to find visitors and quick. There are a few ways to do this, but in the end it all comes down to your web visibility. The first step will be to get indexed by Google, because lets face it when it comes to the Internet, we all know that Google is king of the search engines. You can do this two ways.
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Submit your site to Google and then wait for them to crawl it.
- Let Google find your website by itself.
I almost always take the first approach, it just seems the safest, but let us discuss the second option and how that happens. Firstly, you have to understand how Google indexes pages. It does this by crawling the web, its already indexed sites, and then it follows the links that are those sites. If your site just happens to be one of those links then you will end up on Google. However, when you try to search for your site you will probably be around result 1000 or worse for your keywords. It hurts, but why is this happening. One reason, Google just doesn't like new sites, so give it time. Also your website may not be Search Engine Optimized (SEO). And then the other reason - your websites Google PageRank.
What is PageRank? PageRank is Google's measure of your sites worth on the web. It is calculated by the PageRank of and quantity of backlinks to your site. So, it can be safe to say that at first you will have no PageRank. Then as you have been around for a while and your backlinks grow, you will see it change from no PageRank to 0 and then 1, and if you have one of the most popular sites on the web all the way up to a PageRank of 10. But, lets face it. If you are reading this article you are not anywhere near a 10 so lets talk about getting your PageRank up past 0.
At first this may seem difficult, when you have no PageRank no one really wants to link to you (you can actually get penalized from linking to a PageRank 0 site, so be careful). How can you get quality backlinks (high PageRank and relevent to your site). Here is the beginner's list of how to increase PageRank:
- Get active in forums - put links to your website in the signature block
- Submit your site to directories
- If you have a blog - submit to blog directories
- Comment on blogs - some will allow you to put a backlink to your site
- Link to it from any other sites you own
- Look for links from high PageRank sites that are relevent
- Conduct a targeted link exchage with quality sites
While you are doing all of this here is what you need to avoid:
- Excessive linking from your site to bad neighborhoods on the web (Look for low PageRank)
- Conducing irrelevant link exchange - not all links are created equal
- Watch for webmaster tricks - JavaScript links, Flash links, and nofollow tags on links or the robots.txt file
- Using scripts or paying for links - Google will penalize you if it thinks your links are bought
- Linkfarms or Webrings
If you do all this your should be able to sit back and watch your PageRank and your position on the search engines rise, but be patient. Google is trying to tell us to stop worrying so much about the little green bar and has stopped updating PageRank but a few times a year. Good luck and happy hunting.