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Search engine optimisation professionals understand that new sites often take time to get crawled and indexed by Google. There are however some SEO methods you can use to help speed up the indexing process.

The best method is to buy an existing domain that already has some internet presence. As the domain already has some history the search engines will already regularly crawl and index the site. Getting an existing domain however can be expensive and difficult. Thankfully there are other SEO methods you can utilize to get your site indexed quicker, these include:

• Content – Ensure your website contains several pages of content. Don't have a site that simply says "under construction" on the home page, create an index page of good content
• Social Bookmarking – Sign up to an account with popular social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon and Digg, submit some pages from your site and tag them in relevant categories. Google regularly crawls social bookmarking sites, and may well follow the links to your site
• RSS Feed – Create an RSS Feed for your site, and ping the feed out to different RSS feed aggregators. Most Blog platforms will do this automatically for you. These feeds will contain links to your site that search engines may follow
• XML Sitemap – Create an XML sitemap for your site, dynamically if possible and submit the sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools. After the sitemap has been submitted Google will know about all the pages in your site
• Add some Google Ads – Create an account with Google Adwords and run some ads. It does not need to be expensive, use long tail keywords to make the budget last longer. Google will follow the ads and go to your site to determine a quality score for your landing page.

Although these tips do not guarantee your site will be indexed within a day. They may speed up the indexing process, so that it only takes a couple of days.

Paul
SEO Programmer

Today, for one day only, Google.co.uk has turned its homepage black to raise awareness for Earth Hour, when everyone throughout the World is asked to do a little bit to conserve energy on our planet. Everyone is asked to turn off their lights, for one hour only, tonight between the hours of 8pm and 9pm.

From Google:

On Saturday, March 29, 2008, Earth Hour invites people around the world to turn off their lights for one hour from 8:00pm to 9:00pm in their local time zone. On this day, cities around the world, including Copenhagen, Chicago, Melbourne, Dubai, and Tel Aviv, will hold events to acknowledge their commitment to energy conservation.

I think Google looks great in black, though of course this does make it more difficult to focus on the text which is probably why Google hasn’t turned its results pages black as well.

What do you think of the new, limited edition, black Google homepage?

Darren
Content Editor