If you are creating a new website and want to receive traffic from Google within 4 to 6 months then good luck! A new domain does not carry much weight with Google. Older and established domains are so much easy to rank compared to new domains.

Here are a few tips that will help you to get a new domain to rank faster.

SEO Tip 1

As soon as you get your domain set up, straight away get your designer to create a home page with some basic text and keywords that you want to rank for and maybe an image – your logo perhaps. Don’t make the common mistake of waiting till you have a perfect home page before you add something. Do it right away. Then you just need Google to visit and index your page. This is the tricky bit but can be done in a few ways.

If you don’t do anything to get Google to visit it may take three or more months before Google even finds out about your page.

What you are doing is starting the timer on Google. For the first three months or so Google will ’sandbox’ your site. What that means is that it is playing ‘wait and see’. It is starting to build trust around your site. It will not jump in right away and rank you high – it will watch and see. Yahoo on the other hand is different – it will gobble up anything you send it and rank you high very fast if you give it good content – as long as you wake it up in the right way. More on that below.

So with your new home page up, and when you do what I suggest below, your site will be found quicker and the timer will be started. At the same time your designer will be busy creating your site and getting everything perfect which can take up to three months. So when you full site is ready to go Google should be ‘letting you out of the sandbox’.

SEO Tip 1 – Action

The fastest way to tell Google and other search engines you exist is to send it a special invitation in a special format. This format is XML. It is a little secret (especially with Yahoo) to get search engines to visit fast without doing much work.

All you do is the following:

• Add the text below to your site saving the file in the root of your site and call it sitemap.xml
• Change the URL web name (yoursite) to your site address
  Upload the file to your webserver – you may have to get your designer to do this
• Change the lastmod date – <lastmod> to today’s date (format yyyy-mm-dd)
• Save the file
• ‘Ping’ the XML site map to Google, Yahoo and a couple of other search engines using the link below changing (yoursite) to your site name in the link
• You are done – you will receive a message from each search engine in turn
• Check if you are indexed in Google by typing this info:http://www.yoursitename.com replacing www.yoursitename.com with your actual site name

It may still take a few days for Google to respond but this should work.

Sitemap.xml

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
	xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
	xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
			    http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
	<url>
		<loc>http://www.yoursite.com/</loc>
		<lastmod>2010-02-23</lastmod>
		<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
		<priority>1.0</priority>
	</url>
</urlset>

Use this link to ‘ping’ the major search engines – just replace (yoursite) with your real site name.

http://www.sitemapwriter.com/notify.php?crawler=all&url=http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

SEO Tip 2

As we mentioned trust is everything for Google so finding ways to increase this always helps especially with a new domain. One very overlooked way to do this is with the registration of your domain name. Most people when they initially register a domain only do so for 12 months. This is a big mistake!

The message you are sending to Google when you only register a brand new domain for 12 months is that you do not intend being around for long. Of course this is usually not the case, you are just saving money! Don’t save money – purchase a minimum of three years on a new domain, five or 10 are better.

So right now your solution is simple – extend your domain registration to at least three years, five is better.

Google can see the domain register for all domains seeing it is public information so it can use this to assess your plans. Companies that are serious about what they do, and more professional, will register for longer periods of time. Google notes this extra level of professionalism allowing it to build more trust which usually translates to better rankings faster.

SEO.SIMPLE. Blog

One very powerful thing you can do is create a blog on your site. This can be done as soon as you create your site. Our SEO.SIMPLE. service comes with a blog all set up for you along with a regular content service. Having a blog on your site will make a massive difference to your SEO and even if you main site is not ready for a month or so the blog will act as a ‘landing pad’ for Google to start ranking you.

We can set up the blog normally within a few days and it does not affect what you web design people are doing at all. So registering for our SEO.SIMPLE. service will get you up and running with Google super fast.

Have your seen the relativity recent new tool from Google – the local business results – displaying in the local business listing on Google. It’s a helpful tool for local businesses and appears at the top of many local search results in regional search engines like Google.com.sg.

Local business results

You can get a listing here for free by registering in Google’s local business directory. So you can get a first page listing on Google withing about a week or less – for free!  But don’t get too excited you are unlikely to stay there for long! There are limited spots and it seems Google just shows the latest. So for the time invested it is well worth registering.

Local business results link

If you want to receive the link then just download our free SEO pack and the link will be given. You will find the registration box on this page just on the right hand side.

To busy to register in Google’s local business directory

If you are too busy to register we can do everything for you for SGD $80 – just contact one of our SEO consultants now.

Being in my antiquated 40’s – hippy 1965 baby to be exact – I have been around the IT industry well before most of the current players were out of diapers. I was there in our computer room when they unveiled the latest hard drive – it looked like a modern day top-loader washer and was the same size! All up it held a ‘breath-taking’ 40 Meg of data. Yes that is right 40 Meg! When we saw the new micro PC’s come out we felt they would never take off (we must have had IBM blood in us!) and the IT journey went on from there.

Today my ‘long teeth’ dip in my beer and my eyeballs roll back in their sockets when I hear some of the hype plastered around the SEO playing field.

Yes SEO can be technical but only usually when you got it wrong at the beginning – your website that is. If you did not hire an SEO consultant to give you the run down BEFORE you started building then you probably ended up with a website punctured with a million SEO holes. These websites can take some fixing for sure. Most web designers know nothing about SEO and what they do know they rarely implement because they are not requested to by you! Not hiring an SEO consultant is like building a three storey house without using an architect and engineer and expecting the builder to get it right – no way.

I come across a good SEO site once in every 100 sites. This is a poor track record for web-developers. Almost every other single site is a ship full of holes sinking in the lower regions of page 196 of Google!

So apart from adding some colorful pros to this piece I suppose I should add some substance. Well here it is – short and simple (well maybe not that short!)

Content is King for SEO

Google uses back links a lot right now to judge a sites popularity. However, it is now very easy to create back links of high quality in large volumes to unbalance the ranking game. Google knows it has to find a way to balance this out. When it does, most people’s ranking will come crashing to the ground overnight.

On the other hand, Google always wants QUALITY content – the best it can display. If you have this, then because content is the only reason why we have search engines in the first place, your site will always do well no matter what twists and turns Google puts its search engine algorithms through.

Never ever forget that content is King in the SEO jungle. Forget at your peril.

We struggled to get content on clients sites for so long until we built it into our SEO ranking packages. We now offer a content and back-linking service (SEO.SIMPLE.) that solves this inherent problem. Now our clients get fresh unique content on their sites weekly and gain ranking results from it seeing it is SEO optimised as well.

Your content delivery engine needs to be well tuned

Don’t think that you can just add content to a site and miss out on the platform you are adding it to. Google wants to make sure that the content is not only the best for the keyword requested, but it also delivers the best user experience. So make sure you cross you T’s and dot your SEO eyes when it comes to ensuring your website delivers the best experience such as doing these :

• Ensure your server is fast – Google recently added this one – upgrade today if it takes too long to load your pages
• Make sure ALL images have ALT tags WITH meaningful content
• Make sure every page has a UNIQUE page title relevant to the content of the page
• Fix Canonical issues (were http://www.yoursite.com and http://yoursite.com and http://www.yoursite.com/index.php etc all resolve to the same page but have different addresses. Instead they should all redirect to a single page and that page should be used throughout the site in all links. If you are on a UNIX based server this can be fixed quickly usually through the htaccess file)
• Make sure there are at least 300 words of meaningful text on any page – the more the better for Google
• Make sure that if you are using a CMS that the URL’s are fixed so only words appear (and preferably keywords) and not funny programming expressions and numbers
• Whenever you create a link use a keyword(s) and not the notorious ‘click here’ as the anchor text
• If you cannot add content to your site (maybe you have a flash site), then at least add a blog attached to your site – this helps a lot
• When you next renew your domain, renew for at least 3 years – after all longevity shows maturity and increases trust

Back links and more back links for SEO

And of course do not stop back-linking. Right now it is the powerhouse for SEO but don’t rely on this for the future.

So I hope this has helped ‘de-hype’ some of the SEO materials out there and helped you along the SEO road a bit further.

• This appears top left of a browser window in the blue band at the top of the screen.
• Google and other search engines display this AS IS in their search results. It will only truncate if too long.
• This should be 100% unique for each page of the site.
• It is best to make the title consist only of keywords wherever possible.
• If adding your brand to the title add at the end instead of the beginning.
• Keep the title to 65 chars or less so it does not get truncated in Google.
• The title MUST relate to the content of the page – so no spamming of the title.

The 2nd most important SEO element is the page URL.

• This should ideally not contain any non standard characters such as & and ? (which many CMS systems have as standard).
• It is also best not to have each page come off a standard page name like index.php eg index.php?pg=3  or index.php?pg=4.
• It is best that each and every page has a unique page name that is relevant to the page content.

Next SEO element – H1 (heading tags).

• H1 is like the title of a chapter in a book in level of importance.
• To rank well a page should use H1 (and no other HTML markup options).
• It should also use keywords in the title.
• It is best to make the title only keywords – a single keyword is best.
• H2 should be used in the same way as H1 titles.

An important SEO element for click through is Page Description (meta description tag).

• Google says this is not considered for SEO but we have found it uses it to highlight KW’s people are searching on.
• This should be controlled 100% seeing it should use direct sales language to get people to take action now.
• It appears under the page title in the search results.
• It should be a maximum of 155 characters long (including spaces) so that it does not get truncated.
• If every page has a different description,  then Google uses the one you give it 9/10 times.
• If each page has the same meta description Google will normally pick up text from each page instead.

SEO Keywords are not needed.

• Not used by all major search engines.

If you are on a slow connection allow video to ‘buffer’
- click play then click pause. Come back later and then play.

SEO WordPress Intro

If you are on a slow connection allow video to ‘buffer’
- click play then click pause. Come back later and then play.

SEO WordPress Intro

If you are on a slow connection allow video to ‘buffer’
- click play then click pause. Come back later and then play.

SEO WordPress Intro

If you are on a slow connection allow video to ‘buffer’
- click play then click pause. Come back later and then play.

SEO WordPress Intro