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Site Not First in Search Engine Results

Why is my site not the first result on Google or another search engine?

It is extremely difficult to be the first result on Google or any other search engine. This article should help first get your site indexed and listed on a search engine.

Submit your site to the search engines
Make it relevant
Schedule a revisit
Professional SEO

Submit your site to the search engines

There are thousands of search engines out there, but only a small fraction of them are likely to send you more than a couple hundred of visitors each month. Instead of submitting your site to as many search engines as possible, please focus your energy on the top three.

Google
Bing/Yahoo
Ask

Once you have narrowed down your focus submit your site to your chosen search engines.

Do NOT spam the search engines. Once you submit your site to a search engine, don't submit it again the next day -- they got your submission. If you continue to bother them with "hey look at my site" submissions, you can get banned and be refused a listing. Some times it will take up to 2 - 8 weeks for your site to get fully indexed and listed properly. Be patient! For the most part, you do not need to re-submit your site over and over again. If you make some major changes or additions to your site, there is no harm in re-submitting it 3 months later, but not every week.

Make your site relevant

The best way to increase your site's ranking is to increase how relevant the content on your site is. Search engines want to return the most relevant content related to the search. So you will want to make sure that the content on your site is up to date and matches any keywords, phrases or terms that your customers might be searching for.

Schedule a Revisit

Add the revisit after 30 days meta tag to your pages and you will not have to worry about re-submitting your site to search engines. Search engines send little computer programs (called spiders or bots) out continually to search the Internet for web pages. These spiders (or bots) read what is on each page and send the information back to the search engine site.

     <meta name="revisit-after" content="30 days">

Some web masters claim this tag is obsolete. However, many use it in conjunction with site changes and swear by it.

Hopefully, you have planned your website launch and previously optimized your site for search engines. If you have not done this, you should still have some time to do this.

"Optimizing" for search engines - search engine optimization - means having the right things in the right places so that spidering programs (also known as "robots") get the information and impressions about your site that you want them to get. Make sure you have the right metatags>, keywords and the right content on each page.