Marketing your Website: Need just a little Patience (and Time)

With today’s article, I am going to touch on something that we all need to have with marketing a website. And that is a little patience. It is best to have a good understanding of how the search engines work. The better you understand them, the better educated decisions you can make on your marketing campaign.

When it comes to marketing your website, we are all dependent on the search engines. This mainly pertains to the organic search engine listings (these are the free listings). With the search engines, it can take months for your site to be listed and to start ranking. It is not uncommon to see a site take 3 months to start to get off the ground with organic listings when first starting off. Each search engine has its own schedule for updating its database therefore each will not be on the same update cycle.

Google PageRank, Building Content & Link Building

In the forums lately, many are waiting for the next Google PageRank update. It has been about 2 months since Google’s last PageRank update. I must admit that I am waiting on this as well (patiently waiting that is). I launched my site (August 2004) and have actively started link building and writing articles. I know that my site has been indexed in the search engines and that the spiders have visited my site through monitoring my logs. Also, for the links that I have collected to my site so far, the majority of these have been indexed. But now comes the waiting game that we all have to deal with. Waiting for the search engines to update their database and to get credit for the newly incoming links that were obtained.

Need Results Now? Consider Paid Advertising

So, if you need results now and you have some money set aside in your marketing budget, you should look into using paid advertising for getting some instantaneously hits to your website. This is good for time sensitive marketing campaigns, or if you need more traffic for any given month. Using a combination of paid advertising with your regular marketing campaign is often a good idea. Even if you are on a budget, there are options that you can take to get the most out of your money. Focusing the targeted keywords and with some of Paid Advertising, you can focus on certain geographical areas. These are just two options that you can consider to help get more for your dollar.

Getting Listed in the Directories

The next hurdle for my site was getting listed in Open Directory. I am an editor for a few categories in Open Directory, so I am able to see how active that certain editors are. So I am able to get an idea if my site might get reviewed in a timely manner or not. For the category that I submitted my site to, it took about 5 months, which in all honestly is pretty good. The fact that I am a DMOZ editor does not mean I get special treatment. What does help is writing proper titles and descriptions so the editor does not have to make any changes. I also decided to submit to Yahoo’s Directory, and there were no problems getting listed with the title and description that I wanted.

With link building, one thing that you have to remember is that the search engines still have to re-index those pages that your link now appear on, and this can take up to 3 months or more at times, depending on the updating schedule of the search engines. In turn, after your site starts to get credit for those new links, you will start to get higher rankings in the search engines.
The Ongoing Battle

So having a little patience with the search engines will go a long way to helping your marketing campaign be a success. As always, for those that need traffic now, there is the paid advertising route that you can take. Last but not least, rankings do fluxuate!