“My site’s been up for two whole months now and I’m still waiting not getting any traffic. How long do I have to wait?”
It’s a question that gets asked surprisingly often. For those of you reading this who were about to ask that question, read on. For those who have found themselves answering this question on several or more occasions, there might be a few tips in here that you can include in your answer the next time.
Fist of all, 2 months is not really much time for a site to be online and to start getting any kind of organic traffic, you should be thinking in the 3, 4, 5 month ballpark before it starts kicking in. Google will probable take longer than Yahoo or Bing.
As far as getting “major organic searches”, it’s going to take more than just time for that to happen. Here at Metapilot, we often get asked this question by new site owners. Besides time, you need to be investing resources into your site’s content, optimization, back links and analytics in order for the site to start paying you back with traffic.
In order to make sure things are on the right track at this point, here are a few things you look at:
First, do the following search in Google, Yahoo, and Bing:
site:mydomain.com (replace mydomian.com with your domain name without the www).
Notice if all of the pages you’ve created on your site are listed in the results of each of those searches. If not, ensure that your site is not all in flash, that your navigation is not in flash or JavaScript, that your default page is not completely in Flash, and work on getting some decent links to your site.
Do each of the pages that show up in the site:mydomain.com search contain unique snippets (the snippet is the link and the description that is listed for each page)? If not, edit each of your pages’ html to include a unique title tag and meta description tag that is relevant specifically to it’s specific page.
Does the URL (web page address) that shows up for each listing in the site:mydomain.com search include the www or not? if not, you may have canonicalization issues to address. Go to Google webmaster tools and select your preferred domain, make sure that links to your homepage from within your site all point to your preferred domain, make sure that your designer used your preferred domain when linking to your site from their portfolio, and verify that any directory or other links you’ve been building are also pointing to your preferred domain.
Make sure that you’ve submitted your site through each of the search engine’s local/maps interfaces and that you’ve submitted it to the Yellow Pages, Citysearch, local.com, Superpages.com, and Insiderpage.com
After doing all of that, focus on keyword research, building content pages focused around your keyword research, and on link building.
