Dude, Where's My Web Site? Why Your New Web Site Doesn't Show Up in Google

Do you have one of the multitudes of small businesses which recently started a site that receives no patrons? Perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions about web marketing is that just having a site will bring you people who become clients - however, that just doesn't appear to work out that way. An unfortunate many believe in what I refer to as "Field of Dreams" web marketing, thinking "If you build it, they will come."

Are you curious:

• Why does the web appear useful for some businesses, but not others?


• How much time does it take for my website begins coming up in Google?


• When will [my site] start earning money?

Is my web site even showing up in Google?
Just because you put up a web site, doesn't instantly mean that Google will find your web site. It's easy to check if Google has indexed your web site by searching on Google for "site:mydomain.tld", as an example, "site:Envision-Web-Promotion.com". If your results come back with any listings at all, Google has found and crawled your site. If your search results come back with the notorious "Your search did not match any documents", they've never heard of you – they just don't know that your web site exists at all.

How do I get my web site into Google?
Sure, you can "ask" Google to visit your website, but that will put you in a looooong queue of web sites hoping to get added. The absolutely best choice for getting added quickly is to have a link to your web site – somewhere. Now that someone has linked to your web site, and Google learns about that link, your web site will be in line for fast-indexing.

So what's the best way to get my first link?
There are many ways to do this, very affordably. You can:

• Ask a chum to place a link to your web site from theirs,


• Post messages in a forum, with your web address in your signature,


• Enter a comment on someone's blog and include a link to your web site,


• Start your own blog on LiveJournal.com and link to your web site,


• Set up an account on a social bookmarking website like Digg and use it to bookmark your web site,


• Create a free reprint article and upload it to SearchWarp, EZineArticles, or Free-Reprint-Articles.com

The more often Google checks the place where your link was put, the more quickly Google will find that a page out there linked to you. Some web sites are updated as seldom as once every few months, other places are updated several times every hour. The best tactics to get your site crawled are through social bookmarking services or article marketing.

If you can get to your web site logs, sift through them for hits by something called GoogleBot. This is the program that Google uses to spider around on the web. As soon as you discover that Google has started crawling your web site, it doesn't be long until your site: search starts showing results. But, you've seen only the first of your worries…

Okay, so when will my site start getting traffic?
Now that your web site is listed, why doesn't it come up in search results? If you read through each search engine result, you'll discover that web site is toward the end of results for everything but your company's name. And if that business name is pretty common, you're probably at the of that list, too.

Playing in the Sandbox…
Your web site will remain in a special place that Google refers to as your web site may be very] well linked, appreciated, and built - it just won't wind up on search results until it has aged satisfactorily for Google to believe that your web site is not a spam-site.

How much time your web site hangs out in the sandbox depends on many aspects and Google won't fess up. The important thing to bear in mind is that web marketing is a long-term effort. There aren't any magic pills your web site can take to outsmart Google. Google does its best to ensure that people are given the best search results. Making your web site endure the sandbox is Google's mechanism for meeting surfers needs and retaining their ranking as the best search engine.

Daiv Russell does web marketing copywriting for Envision Software. Visit our site for our whitepaper on applying the 4C formula for web marketing success. Make sure to submit your articles to Free-Reprint-Articles.com