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Articles Index >> Marketing
How Long Does It Take to Get a Search Engine
Ranking?
by Michael Cheney
Almost every webmaster I’ve heard of and I’ve come into contact
with has asked me this question. Everybody wants a top search engine ranking.
You want to be listed in the top position for your key phrases, but when you
first start out with your website you become very eager to see those top rankings
and those top positions as quickly as possible. That’s why people always
ask this question.
There’s no hard and fast rule. Some search engines will list you quicker
than others. But the first thing to say is that you should always follow their
submission criteria. You should play by the search engines rules. Listen and
read the instructions that they give you and follow them to the letter; otherwise,
you might not get listed at all.
Never submit your site to a search engine unless it’s fully completed.
If you have any pages on there that state “under construction” or
“coming soon” the chances are that you might not get listed.
So there’s a slight difference. You can get listed on a search engine
relatively quickly; sometimes in a matter of days or weeks. But to get ranked,
that is highly ranked so that you’re actually getting a good volume of
traffic for certain key phrases, could take a good deal longer.
If your website is just starting out, chances are that it won’t have
lots and lots of people linking to it. This is a key factor when you’re
trying to get a top search engine ranking. The more links you have, the more
votes a search engine sees you as having from your internet community.
But don’t just try and establish links with any old website. You need
to exchange links with other relevant, high-quality websites. The other thing
about links is you should also try to exchange links with sites in your sector.
Just establishing links with quality sites is not enough.
Having said all that, you can get very good rankings fairly quickly (i.e. within
a matter of weeks) if you use the right tools and information. The whole ethos
of search engines and getting a good ranking is based on the keywords and key
phrases you use. If you’re targeting the wrong keywords, or you’re
not targeting any keywords at all, you won’t get highly ranked for the
best phrases and you won’t get any, or much, quality traffic from search
engines.
So if you want my shortcut to getting a high ranking in the search engines
like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. then it will be only to submit once you’ve
gone fully live. Also, have lots and lots of great content jam-packed with relevant
keywords, but don’t just dream up these keywords and key phrases. You
need to use a tool to get these key phrases.
The tool that I use, and I swear by this, is called WordTracker. It removes
all the guess work from choosing your keywords and Meta tags as it tells you
exactly what people are typing into search engines. You put in what your sector
is about and WordTracker tells you exactly which phrases to use, the ones that
have been typed in most often and competed for least. If you use the phrases
that WordTracker tells you to use on your web pages, you’ll start to get
high rankings very quickly in search engines.
You need to have content with the best phrases in it. It’s that simple.
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