How to Get Your New Website Ranked ASAP!

To get a good start with your new website, it is important that your web properties are indexed quickly by the major search engines, but especially by Google. Most webmasters realize this, but many still stumble in the execution phase. If you've had trouble getting your websites indexed, the following tips will make those troubles a thing of the past. Keep reading to learn more.

Indexing 101

We won't spend a lot of time here - you're reading an article about a fairly advanced SEO topic, so it follows that you probably have at least a passing familiarity with the terms. Just in case, though, here's a quick primer: Indexing is just the technical term for getting your website assigned a slot in Google's records (or the records of any other search engine, for that matter). Once your website(s) is / are indexed, they can be found in searches, and that's when you can start seeing positive traffic flow and positive conversions.

1). Identify Your Keywords

Before you get your site indexed, you want to have a site that's worth putting online to begin with. Part of that is knowing what keyword(s) you want to go after. Keyword strategy and SEO are disciplines that could easily take up entire volumes, so we won't be going in depth with them here (you can easily find all the info you need on Google Webmaster Tools, so don't worry!). Instead, it's sufficient to say that picking keywords that are too broad or general - "insurance", for example - is an exercise in futility.

2). Market to a Specific Target Group

Keywords are going to obviously describe your service or products tailored to your target group. Lack of a concrete product niche will leave you spinning your wheels. For example, if you would like to work as an insurance publisher, you may be able to build a content-rich website related to insurance. However, established companies such as Progressive, Esurance and Geico will always hold the top spots.

So, what are you to do? A key success driver is being specific! To get your insurance blog ranked, you might start with a blog for one insurance type such as home insurance. Use long-tail keywords such as “first time homebuyer insurance” to your advantage. This will increase both the speed at which your site is indexed and the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

3). Start Producing Content

Having a lot of quality content on your website before you initiate it is incredibly helpful in terms of both indexing speed and ranking performance. To that end, many marketers recommend to start with at least 25 pages of tight, readable, keyword-rich content on your site before you ever launch it.

This means long-form content, too. You can mix in a few shorter pieces - videos, links to other people's work (with credit, of course!), and the like - but aside from this bit of variety, your main focus should be on creating original, compelling pieces of 2,000+ words that are relevant to the focus of your website.

4). Don't Make a False Start!

The number of people who submit their sites for indexing before they're actually ready is staggering. Don't be one of them! Get your website optimized for both PC and mobile viewers, get all your plugins set up (these will handle the streamlining of SEO tasks, security, site speed boosting, and more), make sure all your content is error-free and that there are no obvious technical glitches, and finally, ensure your robots.txt file is configured properly. You should also check to see that your index and follow meta information is set to "off" until you're ready to go live - this is super important, as it tells Google how to treat your website(s)!

By the way, it just so happens that you can do all of this from the control panel of WordPress, which is probably the most popular CMS - that's Content Management System for the laymen of the group! - in the world. It's easy to use, it has a huge development and support community, and it's free! There's no excuse not to use it. It'll make it a breeze to set your website up for maximum indexing speed.

5). Execute a Dual Attack

Google's algorithm is a funny thing. It may well be that The Big G is the closest thing we have to artificial intelligence, yet for all that, it can sometimes take a frustratingly long while for Google to index a website. To promote your own visibility in the process, you need to be doing two things: First, you need to be continuously producing more of the long-form content discussed above. Write it yourself, hire someone else to produce it, it doesn't matter so long as it gets made and added regularly. Second, you need to be promoting yourself! While it's true that self-promotion makes a lot of Internet marketers squirm, promoting your website on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and so on while flooding it with quality content on a regular schedule won't just get you indexed more rapidly, it'll help keep you in a favorable position for the long term.