Before you worry about search engine rankings, you should make sure your website is indexed in the search engines. To get indexed, they need to get crawled.
There are some very important details you need to take care to pay attention to if you want your site to get crawled by the search bots. Here’s the short list:
- Make sure your site’s architecture is sound
- Get a sitemap
- Add some inbound links
- Update your website frequently
If you’ve just built your website, then chances are you have none of this yet. Hopefully, your web development team built you a site with a solid architecture.
Your first step should be to add a sitemap to your website. It’s a pretty simple procedure, but it’s necessary to ensure the search engines can crawl all of your pages well. After that, you need to get some inbound links – quickly.
To add links to your website, start by sharing your first web pages to all the popular social networks. Share to LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, and Twitter. If you have images, share to Pinterest. If you have videos, share to YouTube. After that, start blogging. Blog every day for the first 30 days of your website’s life.
If you have shared your web pages on the popular social networks, then your site should get crawled and indexed within a week. But it could take longer, so make sure you blog.
Next, build a Facebook and a Google+ page for your brand. As you blog, share your blog posts once daily to your Facebook and Google+ pages. Then share those on your Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn profiles. If you are diligent at this, you should see your website in the search engines pretty quickly.