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“Sam stays up-to-date in the search industry which is constantly changing, and I've always found her work effective and thorough. With Sam you can be sure that what she advises will be not only industry best practice, but for the client's long term benefit.”
Robin Houghton, Director,
Robin Houghton Communications
SEO & The Waiting Game
You’ve researched your keywords, incorporated them into your page content and written title and meta tags for your web pages – you’ve worked hard to do a good job of optimising your site. So what next, when can you expect to see results?
Well, unfortunately search engine optimisation (SEO) is a bit of a waiting game and it can be a very long waiting game if you’ve just launched a brand new site, not helped by Google’s so called ‘Sandbox’ of putting brand new domains on hold in case they try to use dodgy methods to get to the top.
But don’t let that put you off! Just because you might not get high rankings on Google for several months, it doesn’t mean that your efforts stop there. You should start to see rankings on Yahoo! and MSN first, so do some checks on these search engines for your keywords after a couple of months.
One of the most important things you should be doing is building links to your website. We’ve written a couple of articles on link building already, so the first thing you should do is to get your website listed in some directories and relevant industry sites that can send targeted traffic. Starting to gain links should be much quicker than waiting for high rankings if you start early on, and these sites should bring some traffic while you wait for your rankings to take effect.
If you think you could get some publicity from your new site launch, then why not write a press release and get it published offline and online? Try sites such as PR Newswire and Pressbox.
Like writing? Get writing articles and tips and get them published on relevant industry sites carrying links back to your site. You’d be surprised how many websites will take articles as it saves them having to write fresh content on a regular basis.
Social networking is starting to take off, particularly in the US and if you’re targeting businesses or consumers over there, it might be worth thinking about making use of some established social networking sites and search engines such as Digg, MySpace, Orkut.
Why not start a blog? Although it may take a while for your posts to start gaining rankings, it’s another way of driving traffic to your site, and of course, gaining extra rankings as your blog will link back to your website! There are various free blogging tools, the most well known being Blogger but others exist such as LiveJournal.com, Vox.com, and WordPress.com.
Finally, if you're really desperate for traffic, don't forget to set up pay per click campaigns with Google Adwords and/or Yahoo! Search Marketing & Microsoft AdCenter.
Be as open minded as possible as the opportunities are endless online – they don’t just start and stop with the search engines. Be proactive and by the time your site comes out of the so called ‘sandbox’, you’ll already have targeted traffic and those all important links!
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