So you just finished putting up a website.
Great!
Fantastic!
Now what?
Sorry to say you will not have visitors beating down your door right away. If you just put up a brand new domain name it will take quite a while for the search engines to find you... Actually, have you ever wondered HOW the search engines will find you?
It's not magic. The search engines will find you when you either tell them that your site exists, or when some other website links to yours. It does not happen automatically.
You could set up a Google Local account or a Google Webmaster Tools account, but neither of those accounts will help you get placed in the search engines quickly.
The best way, and perhaps the only way to get yourself found by a search engine is to go out and get links. Yes, get links. You need to spend a lot of time contacting other websites and asking them to put a link from their site to yours. In turn you need to put a link on your site to theirs.
If this sounds time consuming, it's because the process really *is* time consuming.
Imagine this... you need to look around the internet to find a website that does not compete with yours. You also need to make sure the website is credible, that is to say, not participating in online advertising practices that will get it banned from the search engines (i.e. Black Hat SEO). After you found a good website you then need to compose an email to the website owner, or send an email through the contact form, and simply ask them if they would like to "trade links" with your website.
Most of the link trading requests will go unanswered. Many people can't be bothered with trading links with other websites. Although, if everyone understood the true benefit of trading links they would all jump at the opportunity for a link trading offer.
Content is King!
Linking is Queen!
As you get more links from other websites, not only will search engines find you, but the more you get, the higher your ranking will be in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs for short).
So that's it for right now. I just threw some concepts at you and didn't fully define them... Link content is king... and how exactly do you send an email to request a link exchange? I'll write some specific directions for that soon. This was just a teaser to get you interested.
