You’ve launched a great new website and you’re awaiting patiently for it to be indexed.

You Google. Relentlessly.

Your homepage could be indexed within a week or so. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for it to take an entire month (or even two) for the deeper level pages to be indexed.

But if you’re not careful, you’ll never see your website in the search results. Why? It could be a few things…

If you use WordPress

You have an option during development to stop search bots from crawling your site. You should take it. The option is in a small space in a deep corner of your Admin: the privacy settings.

If you use the setting, great; just make sure upon launch, make your site visible!

NoIndex, Nofollow, Robots.txt

Not to get too geeky, but when you check the privacy setting above in WordPress, what you’re doing is adding a robots.txt file and noindexing the site.

However, you don’t need WordPress to do this. You can add a robots.txt file in any website – and there are certain pages you might want to use it for like your Privacy policy.

That being said, don’t nofollow, noindex your entire site after launch…

…or add any pages deeper than the homepage to your robots.txt file. In this case, that little backslash can make a world of difference.

How to make your site index faster

So you’ve launched. You’ve gotten rid of your noindex, nofollow tag and you’re ready to be found. Here are some ways to get found faster:

• Add Google Webmaster Tools. By adding this simple (and down the road, helpful) tool, you’re killing two birds with one stone and also submitting your website to Google.
• Add the Bing Toolbox. Like Webmaster Tools, this automatically submits your website to Bing, along with some other added benefits.
• Create a sitemap and submit it to your Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Toolbox account. While it may not help your site be crawled faster – it will certainly help search engines find those deeper pages a little quicker.
• Get links. Lots and lots of links. The links from quality, established websites you have, the better! Think about it: those websites get crawled on a regular basis, follow a new link to your site and voila! Not to mention…now you have a link to establish expertise.
• Along the same lines, submit to directories.
• Submit yourself on social sites websites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc. Then have friends/colleagues help you go “hot” on those sites.
• Create a presence on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Then link to your new website.

Nicki Hicks
Get indexed

Yesterday, Rich and I did a speaking engagement for the Great Bay Foundation – an organization which supports nonprofit social enterprises; in other words, social entrepreneurs. Before our over arching sessions on all things Web marketing, Laura Quinn of Idealware spoke about some other technical gadgets used for nonprofits for email, constituent data, and collaboration.

While at flyte we talk about a lot about web marketing for corporations, the fact of the matter is many business laws and best practices are the same for nonprofit organizations. You’ll find the slideshare presentations below for Web Design & SEO, Blogging, and Social Media.

For many of these small organizations, the day was a lot to handle; and yet, and invariable pupu platter of technical needs they will soon be able to use to satisfy their organizational needs. [Remember: do what's right for you.]

Web Design, Usability, and SEO

Blogging

Social Media

Recently, I blogged about a session at Social Media FTW (Search Engine Optimization and Social Media). In it, my boss, Rich Brooks, gave a great analogy for incoming links. I didn’t share it then since I wanted to give it its own special place…because I think it’s that powerful.

The analogy

Let’s say you’re visiting Chicago; so naturally you ask 10 friends what restaurant to go to while you’re there (as opposed to Googling it. You’re smart, you want recommendations.) 7 friends suggest Restaurant A, 3 suggest Restaurant B. All things being equal, you’re going with Restaurant A.

That is, of course, until you realize that those 3 friends are Chicago natives and the group of 7 are tourists, just like you. The 3 friends might even tell you “Tourists say Restaurant B, because they don’t know about A”. Then things change – the 3 friends have established their expertise now, and you’re on your way to B for some fine dining.

The same rule applies for Link Building

More links may be pointing to Website A than Website B. At first glance, that might mean that search engines would give more “value” to Website A (all other things being equal)…

But just like our restaurant scenario, things aren’t always as they appear. You see, as far as search engines are concerned, quality incoming links matter – not quantity. Sorry, A.

What’s the takeaway?

Sure, try to get out there and get all the incoming links you can. But the low hanging fruit won’t help you in the long term. Shoot for attaining links from those high quality websites that will help you establish your expertise.

Nicki Hicks
Visual Learner

Thanks for all the photos.

This week, I gave two presentations (or rather, the same presentation, twice) for a senior Business Seminar class at Saint Joseph’s College. Though it’s always nice going back to my alma mater, more so than usual, I feel for the senior class.

A year and a half ago, it was easier to find a job. Obviously, it took some work, but it’s nowhere near the type of competitive environment these soon-to-be grads face in the next 6 months of their job search. So how are you supposed to differentiate yourself in such an atmosphere? Why, with social media, of course!

The full presentation is in Slideshare below, but here are some of the key points:

• On Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter already? Great…now go in and clean up and fill out your profiles. Not on them? Join! (Note: only join Twitter if you can devote the time to it.)
• The next step: go above and beyond. Engage people by friending/fanning, following, and connecting with the right people and groups.
• Jobs in ME/VT/NH and many of your other favorite job listing sites have a presence on all of the major social media networks. Why go to their website everyday when you can engage them via Twitter? or Facebook? or even an RSS feed?
• A really neat find: when I was doing research for the presentation, I stumbled upon some video resumes on YouTube – what better way to add depth to your resume? But be careful – you have to do your video resume the right way; check out the presentation for tips and tricks for YouTube!

SEOQuake

I’ve been using the SEOQuake toolbar for a while now. It’s a gem for any search geek: the ability to quickly see statistics in the search results, from PageRank to indexed pages in Google v. Bing, from incoming links to Alexa rank.

You can also dig a little deeper by getting more information about the site you’re currently visiting; which is a nice one-stop shop for getting any of your basic need-to-know information for client statistics. Here’s a screen capture of what that looks like:

Aside from the SEOQuake Toolbar, the SEOQuake Toolbar also has two products for statistics: SEOPivot and SemRush.

SEOPivot

SEOPivot is essentially designed to show you the potential of ranking for certain keywords for particular pages on your website. For example, a post I did on GetListed.org and Local Search currently ranks #152 for “live local search”, a search term with a potential volume of 1,362 visitors if the post were ranking #1.

SEOPivot reminds me a lot of Google Webmaster Tools’ top search queries. Here are Maine SEO’s top 10 queries in Webmaster Tools:

Very similar, but I will say that SEOPivot offers two added benefits above and beyond Webmaster Tools’ top search queries.

1. The potential traffic you could receive if you were #1. While it isn’t a perfect number, it is interesting if nothing else.
2. More importantly, the average search volume. How many people are searching for this keyword a month? (In other words, is it even worth trying to optimize for?

All in all, SEOPivot will give you some interesting information about where your pages could rank – and you can query 10 websites a day for free, with 5 keywords per site. Want more than that? You’ll have to pay a little.

SemRush

The other SEOQuake tool, SemRush, gives a little more insight. Like SEOPivot, you are still served up keywords from your site, where they currently rank, search volume, and the URL. The benefit here comes in the form of some really great AdWords data, should you be using it, including CPC and competition.

Like SEOPivot, you can get several free reports, but have to pay if you want more than that.

All in all…

SEOQuake remains my favorite, although if you want some interesting statistics about where some of your keywords stand (sometimes keywords you never even thought to rank for), SEOPivot and/or SemRush are for you!

Nicki Hicks
SEO Tool Afficiando