SEO Basics – Search Engine Optimization -
Welcome to the World Wide Wait
Okay, your site is built, it looks great; it's a work of art; you want to show it off, just like a new baby. You hit the publish button or upload it to the server. You type your URL into an address bar and Eureka! Would you look at that, Martha! Isn't she beautiful! You type it into Google and find that Google doesn't know you exist. You try other search engines and find the same results. There must be something wrong with those stupid search engines. You immediately make plans to go right down to the internet office and complain. You even promise yourself to¨God forbid¨cancel your subscription to AOL!
More than 70% of online consumers start their quest for a product, service or support call using a search engine. On Google alone there are over 90 million searches performed each day. If you have a small business, how can you honestly afford NOT to be associated with this massive audience? The bottom line is that you cannot afford to miss such opportunities.
You better not hold your breath however while you are waiting around for the world to come knocking at your door if they don't know how to find you. There are a great many factors affecting search engine rankings but before you get any ranking at all, you first need to be found by the engines. The truth is it takes time to be added to their databases — this is called search engine indexing and it can take between four to eight weeks.
That's right — if you do nothing at all, the major search engines will eventually find you and add you to their growing databases. And it will probably take about four to six weeks on average to see your URL listed. There are ways to help speed up the process. For example, you can submit your site directly to the search engines and let them know you exist. This is called site submission. You can create a webmaster account with them and add a special kind of sitemap, outlining the pages of your website and indicating the importance of each page in relation to the others. Perhaps the best practice is to ensure that your brand new URL gets a number of links pointing back to it from other sites that already exist in the search engine databases. That's because search engines use software programs called "meta crawlers" to "spider the web." They literally crawl from one link to the next and to the next and so on and so on, discovering new information.
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