Colom Newbie

nIs your business one of the multitudes of businesses that just designed a site that has no traffic? Perhaps one of the biggest misunderstandings about web marketing is that simply setting up a website will bring you visitors who become paying clients - alas, that just doesn't appear to happen. Too many believe in what I refer to as "Field of Dreams" web marketing, thinking "If you build it, they will come."

Are you wondering:

* Why does internet marketing appear of use for one group of people, but not others?
* How much time does it take for my website begins coming up in search results?
* When will [my website] start making money?

Is my website even listed in Google?

Simply building a website, doesn't indicate that Google will index your website. It's easy to see if Google has listed your website by looking on Google for "site:mydomain.tld", e.g.: "site:YourDomain.com". If your query comes back with any listings in the slightest, Google knows you're there. If Google responds with the notorious "Your search did not match any documents", they've never heard of you - they just don't know that your website exists at all.

How do I get my website into Google?

Certainly, you might try to "ask" Google to crawl your website, but that will put you in a looooong list of websites hoping to get added. The hands-down most effective way to get added quickly is to have a link to your website - somewhere. Now that someone has linked to your website, and Google stumbles that link, your website will be queued for fast-indexing.

So what's the best way to get my first link?

There are a number of ways to do this, very affordably. You can:

* Ask a friend to put a link to your website,
* Post messages in an online forum, with your site address in your signature,
* Send a reply on a web log and include a link to your website,
* Build your own blog on Blog.com and link to your website,
* Open an account on a social bookmarking service like Digg and create a bookmark to your website,
* Write a free reprint article and upload it to SearchWarp, EZineArticles, or Free-Reprint-Articles

The faster Google looks at the website where your link was placed, the faster Google will find that a page out there linked to you. Some pages are checked as seldom as once every few months, other web sites are checked several times an hour. The fastest means to get into Google are through social bookmarking or article marketing.

If you are allowed to view your website logs, sift through them for visits by an agent called GoogleBot. This is the program that Google uses to discover websites. Once you that Google has hit a few pages of your website, it doesn't take long until your site: search shows a few of your pages. Regrettably, you've seen the beginning of your journey...

So, when do I start getting visitors?

After your website is indexed, why doesn't it appear when I look my keywords? If you pored through each search engine result, you'll discover that website is on the very last page of results for any search but your company name. And if that company name is pretty widespread, your site's likely at the bottom of that list, too.

Playing in the Sandbox...

Your website will get stuck in a temporary location that dubbed} "the sandbox". Even [though your website may be really] healthily linked to, liked, and laid out - it just won't appear on Google until it has been around long enough for Google to think that your website is not a spam-site.

The duration your website spends in the sandbox depends on many aspects and Google isn't giving out the details. The vital thing to bear in mind is that web marketing is a lasting effort. There are no magic pills your web site can take to defeat the search engines. Google does its best to ensure that searchers are provided with the best search results. Making your website go through the sandbox is Google's way of meeting surfers needs and retaining their position as the best search engine.