Recently deployed a new website?

With the increasing number of people and companies that are currently doing it chances are that you either recently did, or perhaps, you are about to do so. Probably the fist thing you did after launch was to try and search for your website in Google. But wait…. when you checked it didn’t appear. This usually leads to the the most common questions we get from clients within the first 24 hours of a website deployment:

?Why does website not come up when I Google it?

Fundamental question for sure, but definitely more complex than it might seem. Although there is a process called propagation (which I will go in depth further in a future article), there are some things that are important to understand the complexity of that question. For the moment, think of propagation as a period of time (usually 24-48 hours) it takes the World Wide Web to receive the information from your newly launched website (as well as website updates).

Let’s start defining a couple of concepts:

  • What is Google?

    Google – search engine program. Other examples of search engines are: Yahoo!, Bing, Ask.com, Duckdotgo.com.

  • What is SERP?

    SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. This is the page that you see once you search in Google is returned.

  • How does a search engine works in my website?

    Search Engines indexes the World Wide Web identifies items in a database that correspond to keywords that later will be returned to the user when searching for those corresponding keywords.

  • What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

    Methodologies and code based strategies that increase the amount of relevance over a specific set of keyword(s).

What is the backbone for these methodologies and website strategies?

Think of it this way: The more relevant your website is to the keyword(s) that people type for when searching for a service (or product), search engines will push your website up the SERP, increasing “visibility” and by consequence increasing website traffic.

Sure, that’s nice, but I still don’t get it… How do you become more relevant? Relevance is going to be based on the amount of related content you deliver as a website that looks similar if not the same as the same words that people use in search engines when looking for your service or product (Trick in a nutshell: Use the same words, ergo KEYWORDS, get it?!).

Now you might be asking yourself, “how do I know what words are people using when searching for these types of service?” Take it easy; this is getting more “into the weeds” of SEO, but you are off to a great start. Start looking for similar websites with services (or products) that are similar to your website and write down some notes about what you see: What am I typing to get to this result? What do the top 10 results tell me about the content that I should be incorporating into my website? Benchmarking with other competing websites will make you a very successful search engine optimizer.

To give you a straight answer to the question would be telling a half-truth. Gaining visibility and increasing your website’s rank in search engines suchlike Google will take two important components: Time and Strategy! Stayed tuned for the Second SEO Bite!

A good article to check out: 6 SEO Free Tools to Improve Your Visibility – It will give you a good starting point to improving your website’s visibility on the different search engines.