internet marketing ezine 022

1) The quickest way to get a brand new site indexed in Google.

This month I´ve tried 4 different techniques for getting a brand
new website indexed in Google´s search engine.

Which of the following techniques do you think works best ?

a) Using the new Google Sitemaps program, i.e. creating a sitemap
of your website and submitting it to Google Sitemaps

b) Submit articles to article directories in order to get backlinks
which Googlebot can find and then spider your site.

c) Submit your site to a few quality web directories in order to
get the search engine friendly backlinks fast.

d) Blog and Ping, i.e. adding a blog to your site and then post a
few times each day in order to get backlinks.

e) none of the above

And the right answer is …… drrrrumm rooolllll ….

….

….

e) !!

But wait - before I tell you what really worked best for me, let´s
look at each technique first. One actually came pretty close to being
the fastest way into Google´s index.

a) Sitemaps

The new Google Sitemaps program has been touted to be the secret
backdoor into Google´s index and a way to get your site indexed
better, especially by those who are trying to sell you their sitemap
generator tools.

At Google Sitemaps
you´ll find this information:

“Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to help improve your
coverage in the Google index. It’s a collaborative crawling
system that enables you to communicate directly with Google
to keep us informed of all your web pages, and when you make
changes to these pages.”

“With Google Sitemaps you get:

- Better crawl coverage to help people find more of your web pages
- Fresher search results
- A smarter crawl because you can provide specific information
about all your web pages, such as when a page was last modified
or how frequently a page changes”

But if you read through the Sitemaps FAQ you´ll find Google say:

“We don’t guarantee that we’ll crawl or index all of your URLs.”

and

“During this beta period, we can’t make any predictions or
guarantees about when or if your URLs will be crawled or added
to our index.”

I used one of the free online tools to create a sitemap for a
new site and submitted it to Google Sitemaps …. nothing happened.

Ergo: sitemaps might be a nice tool for large sites which are already
indexed and which have a large number of pages, sometimes too many
levels below the homepage, so Googlebot would have difficulties in
finding them.

But if your site has a proper navigation structure, then Googlebot
will find all of your pages by itself anyway and it also will still
schedule future visits according to the real update frequency of
your site and not the one you specify in Google Sitemaps.

b) Submitting articles to article directories

This is a great techniques for increasing backlinks to your site
and through these links, search engine spiders can find your new
web site.

Unfortunately it can take weeks on some directories for your article
to get approved and listed, so you have no control how fast the
backlinks to your site appear on the net.

One of the most busiest directories is EzineArticles.com
New articles are usually listed within a day.

Even though, two weeks after submitting the article, the new site
is still not indexed in Google.

Ergo: writing articles and having them distributed on the web is
a great long term strategy to increase backlinks and of course
traffic, but not for getting a brand new site indexed.

c) Submitting your site to web directories

A paid submission to search engine friendly directories is the
easiest way to get a couple of quality backlinks fast, i.e. within
24-36 hours. Another one of my new mini-sites I´ve submitted to
three directories with reasonable PR and Alexa rankings and also
affordable submission fees ( 10 - 15 $ ):

http://www.linkopedia.com
http://www.aroundtheweb.com
http://www.bigall.com

My site got approved and listed in these directories within
24 hours and it took only 4 days to get the homepage of the site
indexed in Google. Pretty fast, but unfortunately only the homepage.

d) Blog and Ping

This technique has probably been most recommended in the past months
as a sure-fire way to get a new site indexed within 2 days. So I´ve
added a Wordpress blog to another mini-site and posted up to 3 times
each day for about 10 days at different times and I pinged several
dozens of blog engines each time but the site didn´t get indexed.

I mean, it´s true that you get backlinks to your blog by pinging the
blog directories and search engines, but with so many existing blogs
today, you need to be very lucky to have your blog showing up in a
list of recently updated blogs right in the moment when Googlebot
spiders that list.

Ergo: a blog is a great tool to easily publish content on your site
and by syndicating this content receive traffic from other sites.
And by publishing regularily you´ll have a naturally growing site
which the search engines love and that means: better rankings and
more search engine traffic.

But in the end, what really worked best for me to get a brand new
web site indexed in Google within 2 days was:

Having a Blog !

Yep - answer d) came acutally pretty close, but there is one
little detail missing that made the big difference:

You see - blogging and pinging alone won´t do the job.

You must also submit your blog and its feed to a couple of blog
and newsfeed directories - that´s what makes the difference !

First, put a few posts on your blog and then submit your feed´s
URL and your blog´s URL to this list of blog directories

And here´s another little secret you need to know:

On its first visit, Googlebot probably will only spider and index
those pages that are directly linked from the blog index page.

So in order to get all of your new web pages indexed, you´ll need to
include a link to each page on your blog´s index page. You can do
this by adding a few links to each of the first few posts.

Of course, I can´t guarantee how long this technique may work, but
it´s the one that worked best for me this month (to my surprise).

So my recommendation for promoting a brand new site
step-by-step would now be:

1) Add a blog, post and submit your blog´s URL like described above
to get your site listed fast.

2) submit to a few quality web site directories to get good backlinks fast

3) write articles and submit them to article directories and
other webmasters to increase traffic and backlinks.

4) exchange links with only a few closely related sites.

2) Auto blogging tools - good or junk ?

So blogging currently seems to be the best way to get sites indexed
quickly and to grow them naturally to please the search engines.

Let me guess your thoughts you have right now.

” Where in the world will I find the time to manage a blog
for each of my sites, and where do I find all the content to
keep posting regularily ? ”

Of course, publishing a quality blog with your own original content
is a good deal of work and you probably don´t have the time to
manage more than three blogs manually.

Sure, if you have a blog because you are passionate about blogging
this is not a problem at all for you but if you are like thousands
of website owners who have been told they MUST have a blog on their
site to please the search engines and to get more traffic and if you
need to force yourself to keep posting, then blogging will become
more than annoying for you.

This fact has created a big opportunity for smart marketers and
product creators. In the past months, a couple of new products
have been released to automate blogging.

RSS2Blog and AutoBlogger are two examples.

How do I think about these products and automated blogs in general.

First of all, it´s always great to have a time saving tool and
it´s tempting to use tools that have the potential to generate
revenue in an automated way ( page generating tools included ).

But you always need to be careful how you are using these tools,
because - like it or not - the fact is that the search engines
(especially Google) are trying as good as they can to get rid of
web sites that apply these tools.

So if you are generating blog posts solely from RSS feeds then
you´ll be creating a blog full of junk pages and you are putting
your web site at a search engine penalty risk.

Again - I don´t say you should not use these tools, use them as you
please, but be warned that sooner or later your site will get banned
for it, so do use them only on sites that you can afford to lose.

I say that because I know that some people´s business model is to
create as many junk sites as possible and generate revenue from
AdSense or affiliate programs as long as these sites are not banned
from the search engines. I have no problem with that but what I really
hate is that most of the people who sell the above type of products
make totally false and misleading claims in their sales letters.

Instead of claiming that “product X creates web pages the search
engines love to index” they honestly would have to say “use this
product at your own risk - the search engines frown upon this
technique but even though it still works right now”

Also when you are using RSS feeds to generate content-rich pages
(this applies also to Adrian Ling´s new software “Power-RSS”)
you need to know that many RSS sources don´t allow their feeds
to be archived ! So be careful to not violate anybody´s copyrights.

Generally, an automated blogging tool can be very useful and also
used safely and ethically (however you define that).

If you have a lot of articles that you want to publish, then it
would be good to spread them over a certain period of time rather
than posting all at once. Say you hired a writer at Elance to write
50 articles for your blog that you wanted to publish over the next
few weeks.

Or you just dissected a public domain book into short articles that
you want to publish on your blog over a certain time period.

Or you have written a 10 part mini-course that you want to release
on your blog over the next 10 days.

It would be very time saving (and ethical in my eyes) to load these
articles into a tool, set a posting schedule and then forget about
it. AutoBlogger was created for that purpose (but it also includes
the RSS import feature I consider junk).

http://www.auto-blogger.com

AutoBlogger is a monthly subscription service and costs about 50 $.
I don´t use it - but if you have many blogs, then it might be a
good solution for you. Their service also includes unlimited blog
hosting.

On the other hand, if you are only interested in the auto posting
feature - why not go to Elance and have somebody code it for you ?
I guess you could have this done for about 300-600 bucks.

One last note on that:

For Wordpress, there is a free auto posting plugin available, which
allows you to save a couple of posts as drafts with a time stamp
attached and the plugin will automatically post the items when the
time has come. But the problem with this plugin is that pinging
is done when the post is saved as draft and not when published, so
it´s not really helpful.