Starting a website is quite a challenging task. The goal of every website owner is to be well ranked as soon as their website is up and running. The sooner the customer can reach out to you, the better. But, in order achieve that, there are several important steps that every website owner should take.
Becoming indexed as soon as possible is very important because, for a vast majority of websites, search engines are responsible for over 50% of all traffic.
So, let’s dig into the required steps that will get you indexed in a short period of time and also ensure that your website is well ranked, establishing stable traffic as soon as possible.
Learn About The Way Search Engines Work
In order to understand what is happening under the hood, you should become familiar with how search engines like Google function.
First of all, a search engine crawls the internet from time to time, making sure that it is always up to date with the amount of indexed web pages.
The so-called “spider” comes to your website and analyzes its content. In the past, it was fairly easy to manipulate the search engine by constantly repeating the keywords you wanted to rank for.
As years of development were invested in Google’s algorithm, the search engine became much more efficient, and behaviors such as keyword stuffing became actions that are considered illegal and can be heavily penalized. In some cases, websites might become de-indexed from the search engine, making it impossible to find them via the search engine.
The main reason why the algorithm has been so thoroughly developed was because Google wanted to improve their services, making their search engine the best way to find resourceful and trusted websites.
So, Google’s spider comes to your webpage and starts analyzing your content. After analyzing the content, the search engine starts having an idea about what your website is about. Once the content and all other parts of your website have been analyzed, your website becomes indexed for certain keywords.
Once a user types something they need, Google determines how well you rank by comparing your content to other website’s content. All other search engines function in a similar way, with a little bit of a difference in their algorithms.
Now that you know the mere basics of how the search engine functions, we can start talking about the steps that are going to get you ranked in a short period of time.
Get The Blog Section Of Your Website Running
This is a very important part of every website. Actually, this is the tool that is going to attract visitors to your website. It can take a lot of time, but investing your time in creating quality blog content is the single best things that you can do for your website. It is a crucial part of any website, because these pages get indexed more often by search engines due to their level of activity.
Not only will you get ranked faster, you are also going to rank well for a wide variety of keywords important for your niche. Having a blog is also the most important thing for attracting organic visits.
No matter how much competition you have, if you create high-value content that offers a lot of useful information for your visitors means an increase in your authority as a brand. Running a blog requires consistent work.
You do not have to upload content every single day, but creating a quality post once a week will tremendously increase your traffic over a longer period of time. It is far more important that the content you create is a shareable resource, as social networks play a big part in the ranking process. We will get into that later.
Ever Heard Of Robots.txt?
This is a part that might require someone who has coding skills. The robots.txt file is located in the root of your website and it is very important for the search engine. This file is responsible for giving out directions to the website crawlers.
When the search engine’s spider comes to your website, the first thing it looks for is the robots.txt file, which contains detailed instructions about the pages that should be indexed and those that should not be indexed.
It is very important to set up this file, as you don’t want a search engine to find any duplicate content on your website. For example, if you are running several test pages that are inaccessible by a wide audience, you should indicate in the robots.txt file that these pages should not be indexed, so that you can avoid any problems with duplicate pages on your website.
Editing and setting up this file is fairly easy, as it can be done in the standard notepad that comes with every installation of Windows. However, it is very important that you know what you are doing, as you do not want the crawler to run away from your web page.
If you don’t have a robots.txt file in your website’s root folder, the crawler is simply going to index all the pages from your website, so make sure to include this file if you don’t want everything indexed.
The best way to avoid any type of mistake that can occur with this type of file is to hire an experienced professional who can help you set up the file in the correct manner. If you plan to do it by yourself, make sure to do thorough research on how to edit the file properly.
Focus On Creating Flawless Content
This is a very important part of helping your website get ranked highly. Create a plan for your content that ensures that you are offering informative and valuable content for your readers.
Not only should you focus on quality content on your website, but you should also create a thorough guest blogging plan that is going to create links to your website.
Anywhere you post, be it your blog or someone else’s blog, always give your best to offer unique, high-value content. This is going to establish you as a valuable source of information, which is highly appreciated by visitors.
Overall, the content marketing plan should include:
-What goals do you want to reach?
-Who are the people you are appealing to?
-How are you going to approach them? Text? Audio? Video? Webinar?
Answering and writing down the answers to these questions is the best way to stay on track with your plans and create content that will completely satisfy your visitors’ needs.
Create The Sitemap
This is a XML file that contains all of the important information about your website’s pages. The file has enlisted all of the page URLs and it dramatically helps the search engine’s spider in the indexing process. It can even indicate how often the crawler should index your page.
On the Google webmaster blog, it is stated that the sitemap greatly affects the indexing and ranking speed of your web page and its content.
It is important to mention that an XML file does not improve your ranking, it only speeds it up.
Activate Social Media Accounts
This is also a very important plan of getting your website out there. If you have not yet created dedicated pages on major social networks, it is extremely important that you do that. Being present on social media has a great effect on how fast and how often your whole website becomes indexed. The networks you should focus on are: Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr.
The more social networks point back to your website, the better. Additionally, these social media accounts are going to greatly help with creating additional traffic for your website later on.
Creating social networks is the mere beginning for your website; you should use them to spread awareness about your website.
Each platform has a specific approach, you can simply share your website on platforms such as Facebook or Google+, but for networks such as Instagram and Pinterest, beautiful designs, quality images and awesome screenshots taken from your website are a far better option. Take your time and test out which of these options works best for your website.
These are the most important techniques of making your website completely visible and ready for all the search engines out there and their crawlers. Some tips revolve around better results in rankings, others are more important for the speed of indexing, but if you are looking to create a long-standing and profitable website, it is crucial that you include all of these steps when creating your website.
Stay professional, motivated and dedicated and the results will come. Remember one thing, always follow the newest marketing trends; there are interesting resources online that can help you out greatly with creating different marketing strategies.
The author is highly qualified and writes blog posts weekly.
