I built a new site about a month ago. I added loads of content to it, over 100 pages and also bought a load of links back to my site but Google still has not indexed it. Why is this!

Ok let’s take this one step at a time. Firstly age does matter with Google. Domains that are older or have a history with Google will rank better. Why? Because Google can see the progression of them. It’s like older and wiser. So if you register a new domain name it will in most cases take longer to rank than a domain that is older. Google wants to make sure that you’re here to stay and will take the age of the domain into consideration.

Secondly when you have content it wants to see the content grow organically.  “dumping” 100 pages into a website overnight will set off alarm bells with Google. It’s just not natural. Google will know you are just trying to increase your rankings. Compare this to a site that publishes about 5 pages a week, over the course of 20 weeks. It again seems more of a natural growth than 100 pages over night.

Thirdly buying links or backlinks is never a great idea. Google will know that you have bought the links and will not always see them as valuable compared to backlinks that were organically gotten.  How does Google know? Well Google knows everything right! Seriously it has algorithms, and ways of knowing these things.

Here’s my tip. Automate your business. Get a system in place that you can drip feed content. Sure you might have a writing spurt, but automate the content so that you can say load up your 100 articles or posts and then allow them to publish over a period of time. This means that by the time your website has 100 pages in it, it has grown over time and is probably starting to rank well.  However you did not manually have to add each and every page every couple of days.

They key to good website management is automation. Check out my post on using wordpress as a content management system for your website.

You see when you are indexed by the major search engines, they “read” the text on your page. So if you have a really cool, flashy flash movie on your page, guess what the search engines as of yet can not read the content of it.

Another thing many designers do is create text objects as graphics. This may be for menu or navigation items. Guess what? Search engines can’t read the text of these graphical items. One way around this is to do the following. Save your graphic with a descriptive name, for example business_consulting_image.jpg then use the ALT tag to describe the image.

The ALT tag is alternative text that can be read if the browser does not show the picture or if a visually impaired person is using a device or software called a screen reader. A screen reader will read the ALT tag out to the visually impaired person. Think about this it makes sense. The person will then know what the picture is about.  Regardless of search engine optimisation this is a good practice to get into.

Using CSS or cascading style sheets you can make very attractive and interesting designs and not have to over rely on graphics.

Also think with the search engine in mind, then design around this.  Remember search engines love content so give it to them and they will give you the rankings you deserve!