With the introduction of the “theoretical” Google Sandbox it is more difficult for a site to be launched and instantly rank well for competitive key terms. The importance of choosing the correct keywords and doing the seo for the site before the site launches is even more imperative because of the suppression that is put on sites or pages that are born into a world where algorithms rule the landscape. The importance of good programming and beginning with a SEO audit of your technical aspects as your first step, yields a positive and easier walk down the path to good rankings.
Technical Includes
1. Having the correct redirects in place to allow the spiders to follow and rank the correct pages and eliminate duplicate content.
2. Doing a proper no follow campaign
3. Ensuring your pages can be crawled by preforming a website crawl audit.
4. Ensuring you have a robots.txt file that is constructed properly.
5. You have a keyword rich, yet simple url structure.
6. A properly engineered sitemap that follows the strict W3C guidelines for constructing the contents of the sitemap.
Once you have built a good framework for your site and the keywords have been determined with a well thought out strategy and keyword analysis you can then implement your strategy and let the site mature.
The Path To Maturity Is Not A Quick One.
As stated above the importance of building a well structured site and also doing the proper keyword research from the beginning will help your site flow through this ranking and maturity path easier and get you ranked quicker for the strong keywords you have implemented, but you must be patient.
-The Path-
The website or web page is born into the world
As this point the site is neither indexed or cached and can only be found if you type in the direct URL into the browser. If your site comes up this will show that the DNS has been directed correctly and the site is live( if it does not come up wait a day or so because sometimes it takes little time for the server information to update). If your site comes up you can check the structure of the site and make sure it technically strong by running a crawl analysis to find any broken links or road blocks for the spiders, and check your redirect structure to make sure you have properly done 301 redirects where needed.
Web Page Gets Indexed
Each search engine indexes sites at a different rate so dont worry if you site is not indexed in one of the search engines but is in others. You can do a site:www.yoursite.com in the search engine box to see if your site has been indexed. The site being index means that the spiders have crawled your site and categorized it in their index, this does not mean a page has been cached or ranked it just means its been categorized.
Web Page Cached
This means the search engines have analyzed the page, ranked it and cached the page that they ranked for view by a visitor who finds it in the search engines. You can check if a page has been cached by doing a cache:www.yoursite.com in the search box. The ranking is based off that page’s cached code and any changes are made to that page it needs to be re-cached and rerun through the ranking algorithm and re-ranked. A page can be indexed but not cached, this usually means that the page does not hold value in the search engine because its not need unique enough from another page or pages on the web. If a page is not indexed any therefor not cached the page is said to be put in the Google Sandbox, an incubation period for an undetermined amount of time.
Once a page is indexed and cached
Once this occurs you wait for the page to mature. “Mature” means the page has reached its top line rankings for the keyword set it was built upon. This can take up to 6 months for a new page to fully mature in the search engines. You can tell if a page has matured by tracking its rankings over a 3 week period, if the rankings stay within 1 or 2 spots of one another you can pretty well bank that the page has matured. A minimum 3 week period is essential because pages will fluctuate on a daily or weekly basis drastically while the search engines figure out its pecking order and resonate that among its data centers.
Once a web page reaches maturity
Once a page reaches maturity you have to examine a few key pieces
1. Determine if the keyword set you chose is driving the expected traffic based on the page ranking it has earned.
2. Determine if the page is getting the ranking you wanted it to get.
3. Determine if the page is converting for the keyword set its been build upon.
What if my mature page is not performing well?
If you page is not performing well based on the 3 metrics above you need to reevaluate the keyword set, and the design of that page. If changing the page is something simple like changing a graphic to represent a better call to action you will be ok and won’t be suppressed because the page won’t have to be run through the ranking algorithm again. But if ts the keyword set, the structure of the page, or the content on the page (and by content I don’t just mean the words, but the overall technical make up of the page) that you are going to change that page will have to be re-run through the algorithm and you will see a drop in rankings.
This is a constant cycle until you get to the best conversion rate with the best keywords and top rankings. But be patient and stay focused and in time you will have a mature site that produces top results for your business
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