Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Google Indexing - How Long Will I Have to Wait

As SEO experts we're often asked "How long do I have to wait before Google updates its database?" Unfortunately the answer is never an easy one to give and as such we thought we'd try and simplify it here for the benefit of the general public.

One of the first things you have to take into account when it comes to Google's indexing service is how old your site is. If you have a new website or even an old website with no inbound links, then Google might take some time before it indexes your site. The average waiting period here can be anything from 4 to 8 weeks. For those who have just revamped an existing website that already has a couple of inbound links and had some basic SEO in place, that period could be much shorter.

So if you're in the first category of old or new websites, there are a couple of things you should be paying attention to, to ensure that the indexing period is shortened as much as possible.

1. Spider Accessibility One of the main things to pay attention to when submitting your website for indexing is whether or not it is accessible by search engine spiders. If not, then you might have to review the code of your website.

To find out if this is you, have a look at the errors you receive in Google's Webmaster Tools. In addition, it will be wise to include an XML sitemap of your website to ensure that Google's spider finds all your pages.

2. On-Site SEO Is your website currently optimized? Now if you don't know what we're talking about, then it most probably isn't and you'll need to enlist the services of an SEO expert right away.

On-site SEO pertains to the optimization of a variety of tags in your website's code as well as the optimization of content to ensure that web users will be able to find a specific page according to a set of predefined keywords.

3. Link Building This relates to off-site SEO and is probably one of the most important features of SEO. The reason for this is that if other sites link to you because your content is valuable, then Google will assume that you are a source of good information, thereby supplying its users with your website first.

There are a couple of things to be careful of though: too many links too fast could earn you a couple of penalties. As such the road to the top is best taken gradually.

It will also help to ensure that you familiarize yourself with other SEO-related concepts to ensure that your site is perfectly optimized. Getting to the top, especially if the amount of competition for your specific keywords is high, you might want to focus on other techniques to help you in the interim and that will also assist you with your rankings, such as link building. K S Raju a well profounded writer who specializes in writing articles on Effective Contextual Link building and also tells you how to Improve SEO rankings with various SEO link building service. Contact us for more info.

Source: Ezine