In this article we're going to talk about the things you need to do outside of your website to aid your rankings on Google and get you indexed faster. If I'm completely honest with you, this chapter isn't an essential one.
But it does help to speed up the whole process (gets you on Google faster) and will give your rankings on Google a slight boost from the backlinks we're going to gain. The backlinks will help to give our site more `authority' in the eyes of the search engines.
But note that we will not be doing any extensive link building, just some quick social bookmarking really. Getting indexed is important too. Because it can mean the difference between your site getting its first traffic just 2 days after creating it or it taking 3 weeks for the first visitors to trickle in. And the sooner you start getting visitors, the sooner you'll start making money! I recommend that you read this chapter first, and then check out video eight, where I'll show you live how to do everything I've talked about.
Basically, Google will register that you've made a change and will visit your website to see what those changes were. Now, when you make a new wordpress post it automatically pings for you, but I always still ping it again because I suspect the auto ping doesn't announce it to very many websites
The more websites you announce it too the better. When should you ping? After creating your website for the first time (part 1 & 2) ping it, and every time you write a new post after that. All you need to do to ping your site is visit: www.pingomatic.com, enter your blogs name (probably your main keyword), enter your domain name (don't worry about RSS), hit Check all and click send pings. And you're done!
And as such, there's a whole load of new internet marketing courses out now that focus almost exclusively on exploiting them. Fortunately, this system doesn't require you to spend hours socializing over Twitter, and it is possible to make ten thousand dollars per month without ever going near Web 2.0. I mean, I've largely ignored the recent changes like RSS etc.
Why? Because you simply don't NEED to use them. And if you don't need them to make more money, then what's the point? Because as I said earlier, remember that at the end of the day, internet marketing is about making money. Not making friends.
That said, some of the key components of this course are based on Web 2.0. Because we can use some aspects of it to our advantage. Our site for example, is built using Wordpress (a blogging platform) and I also recommend that you make a Youtube video.
Why make a Youtube video? I'll start by stating the obvious: Google likes Youtube (I mean, they do own Youtube after all). I'm pretty sure that Google rewards websites that link to a youtube video (especially if it's directly related to the topic of your site) and I'm also pretty sure that linking to your website from your Youtube video gets your site ranked faster Even if the link is `no follow'.
Note: A no follow link is when a website labels a link or a group of links with the nofollow tag. This tells the Search engines `spiders' not to go through that link.
This stops the website that it's linking to from getting the backlink (which would help the sites SEO ranking). So, really nofollow should mean that the link wouldn't help your site get indexed faster since Google wouldn't visit the link and `discover' your site. But I think it does anyway...
I warned you some of the stuff I do doesn't make sense..
Your Youtube video will also bring you targeted traffic, potentially A LOT of traffic. Not only will it bring you visitors from people searching on the Youtube website itself, but in case you haven't noticed Youtube videos sometimes rank very highly in Google's search results. And if you're lucky, your Youtube video will rank on the first page. I've actually had many cases where the youtube video I made has outranked our actual website.
Notice that I said if you're lucky though, because it seems to just be luck as to whether or not you rank. I honestly don't know why some videos get ranked on the first page for a very competitive keyword and why some don't rank for even the most uncompetitive.
Obviously, we try to optimize our video for search engines as best we can, but no one seems to have figured it out down to a Science... yet. Perhaps soon though? As you can see, there are many reasons to make a Youtube video. So, perhaps a better question would be: why not? And the only reasons why not to make one are the time it might take, or that you're unsure about how to make one.
Don't be put off if you've never made a video before. It's really easy (especially my way) and once you've got the hang of it, it takes less than 20 minutes to make the video AND upload it. In closing, I'll say this: Making a Youtube video is the best use of your time when it comes to traffic generation and off page SEO.
In terms of its effectiveness, it trumps article marketing, social bookmarking, directory submission, craigslist advertising and everything else out there. For the time you have to put in, making a Youtube video is more than worth it, and I make one for just about every site.
A lot of marketers I've spoken to seem to be put off by the idea of video marketing if they've never tried it before. And I don't know why, because it couldn't be simpler: All you need make a short 2 3 minute video about a topic.
It doesn't have to be that professional and you don't need to plan it in much detail. After all, you want to seem like a normal person and not an internet marketer. Also, the good news is that the hardest part is already done for us. Where some people might struggle to find a topic to make their video about (they'd want to find something worthwhile to talk about, something they can monetize, and finally a keyword they could rank for on Google) we already have ours... The topic of our video will be our main keyword.
I mean, obviously we want the video to be related to our site and also, why waste all that research we did earlier in chapter one? Also, chances are, that if you were able to make a whole website dedicated to it, your main keyword must be something that's worthwhile talking about for a couple of minutes. So, that's the topic out of the way.
How do you actually make the video?
Well, while you were making your website, you've probably learnt a lot about the topic in question. So, the absolute easiest way to make a video is this: Record yourself talking about the topic. Seriously, just video yourself talking about something related to the keyword.
You might give your story, a review (if your keyword is specific to a certain product) or you could do a kind of how to video - Giving some basic tips that might help the viewer solve their problem. There's really no rocket Science to it. All I do is decide on a general topic for the video, write down a couple of bullet points to talk about, then film myself talking.
Sure, sometimes these videos have a lot of `errs' and `ehhhms' in them, but they work well enough. The important thing to stress throughout your video is that visitor needs to click the link to visit your website if they want to solve their problem. Make sure to mention your websites URL throughout the video and what the viewer stands to gain from visiting it. All in all, I can create a completely new video from scratch in about 10 15 minutes.
It really is that easy. By the way, if you don't have a webcam and microphone, just film it on your phone or video camera and upload that to youtube. Youtube is very accessible and accepts pretty much every file type known to man.
Uploading it to Youtube So, you've made the video, now all you have to is upload it to youtube. I'm not going to go into creating an account on Youtube, there's loads of free material out there and it's pretty self explanatory anyway. So once you've made your account. Log in and on the top right hand side of the screen, hover over the button that says "Upload" and hit `video file'.
On the next page, browse to where your video's located on your hard drive, hit upload and then you'll be presented with the screen below. I've filled it in saying what you need to write in each field.
Now, this is where all of your optimization comes into play, since Google's spiders can't watch the video itself.
Okay. So your video title should contain your main keyword (preferably first). The first thing you need to enter in the description box is your websites URL, you want users to be able to see that without having to click `more info' when they're watching your video.
As far as length goes, you'd think that the best way to optimize would be to write a big long, keyword rich description. But I've found the opposite. Google seems to believe that less words means its more focused on any given keyword and so you'll usually get better results by writing a short description mentioning the keyword once.
Check out most of the videos with 1 million plus views and you'll notice that the vast majority have less than 20 words in the description. Tags. This is the most important part to optimizing your video. Fortunately it's pretty easy to find which ones are best to use: Steal them from other videos. Now, I don't think many people do this, but they should, because it is extremely effective. Here's how to do it.
Type your main keyword into the Youtube search box and it will come up with a whole list of videos, sorted by what Youtube thinks are the most relevant to the keyword. Now, all you have to do is click on the top few videos, look at what tags they're using and steal them for your video. You want anywhere from 5 12 different tags and note that each individual word is counted as a tag. Obviously, make sure to include your main keyword as well as the stolen ones! Next, just select the most appropriate category and you're done!
That's it. You've made a video, uploaded it, and optimized it as best you can, all in under 30 minutes (hopefully).
Remember that once you've finished this section (just one more thing to do) and you're onto part four, to create your `helpful article' page on your website about that video.
Just write a few hundred words explaining what the video is about and embed it into the webpage. Note: To embed a video from youtube into your wordpress blog just go to your videos URL and paste the code from the embed box:
Bookmarking our website will give us a handful of much needed backlinks (since we won't have ANY others) and will serve to get our site indexed by Google very fast indeed. I would say that this is the most important part of chapter seven, but truthfully, they are all important (I hope you made that youtube video!).
Unfortunately though, bookmarking is a time consuming process. If you do it manually (which I used to) it can take upwards of one hour to bookmark your story to all of the 49 main sites using SocialMarker.com. Naturally though, as with everything in internet marketing, when there's a problem, there's a solution! And there are a few ways to speed up the process... The first is social bookmarking software.
Where a software program automatically bookmarks your site for you. All you have to do is create an account on each of the bookmarking websites once, and it then saves all of your passwords and does it all for you the next and any future times. I know a lot of marketers who swear by these programs but personally I've never had that much success.
Their lists seem to be old and many of the submissions fail (the sites can tell it's a robot or they try to submit to a URL that no longer exists). If you do want to give it a shot though, try bookmarking demon at http://www.bookmarkingdemon.com/ (Tip: Use your own Clickbank affiliate link and save 50% of the sale) Now, what I do, is outsource my bookmarking to another human being. For $5 you can get posted on over 100 different social bookmarking sites, and your story will be posted from an established account on each site.
Anyone who knows a thing or two about social bookmarking will tell you that posting from an established account will bring your stories a lot more traffic. There's always people prepared to do this on the Warrior forum: http://www.warriorforum.com and you can also find guys on all the usual `hire a freelancer' websites like http://www.elance.com Anyway, you'll probably do it manually the first couple of times so here's step by step how to do it. Step #1: Go to Socialmarker.com
Step 2: In the top right-hand corner enter your stories details like in the screenshot below. Then hit Submit.
Step 3: You'll go through each of the 49 sites manually submitting your story and the first time you do it, you'll need to create an account at each of the sites. I recommend you use the same username and password for each website to save time.
I even created a quick email account specifically for bookmarking. Because usually you'll need to confirm your email address = a lot of spam. It may seem like a long winded process but trust me, it is worth it. I guarantee that your site will be indexed on Google within just a couple of days (often in a couple of hours). And the backlinks are also valuable since we literally have none.
Other ways of getting your site ranked If you've spent any amount of time online, then you'll know that there are literally a million and one different ways to get targeted traffic to your website and improve your SEO rankings at the same time. And if you're comfortable using those methods (methods like article submission, forum posting, directory submission etc) then you're very welcome to use them in conjunction with this system.
I actually have quite a few accounts on various different forums on the net (one for each of the main niches) and sometimes I will add my newest website to my signature and make some quick, but helpful posts. It will get your site indexed faster, particularly if it's a high traffic forum. But to be honest, youtube and social bookmarking are the only tools you NEED. I'd only consider other forms of traffic generation/SEO if my site was ranked say 8th on the first page of Google and I wanted to move closer to the top.
In that case I might build a quick Squidoo lens. I'm not going to into how to build one here, but there's plenty of quality free information just a Google search away if you're interested. Everything covered so far here, and some other cool stuff is explained in video eight. So go ahead,
I wasn't sure where to put this in the guide, but I figured it was important that I mention it, and the problems it causes. The Google sandbox is our biggest enemy. And other than not accurately judging the level of SEO competition, it is pretty much the only thing that can cause a website to fail. What is it?
The `sandbox' is basically when Google doesn't allow a new website to rank for a certain keyword because Google deems that a new website shouldn't be as `valuable' as an older, more established site. The new website is placed in a kind of `sandbox' separate from the normal search results for a few months. Where, no matter what you do, your site still suffers a massive penalty for being new to Google's database.
The sandbox is a very hot topic among SEO experts and always has been. It has never actually been confirmed by Google, but they have hinted at its existence in several interviews.
Now, the good news is that you won't get sandboxed often, it seems to only happen when targeting certain keywords. The bad news is that nobody knows what these keywords are, or how to avoid your site getting sandboxed.
There's a few theories out there, but take it from me, from our perspective, it's just a matter of luck whether or not you get placed in the sandbox. Google places so much emphasis on a websites age it's crazy.
I don't fully understand their reasoning behind it, but you can't fight city hall (Google pretty much owns the internet) - We just have to face the facts, that now and again, you are going to sandboxed. And there ain't nothin' you can do about it. Fortunately, it is only usually a temporary setback. Within anywhere from one to five months, you should eventually get the ranking you rightfully deserve.
How can I tell if I've been sandboxed?
Okay, so taking awhile to rank and being sandboxed are very different things. It could take anywhere from a day to three weeks for your website to get a decent position on the first page of Google. But after a week, no matter what the situation, you should at least appear somewhere on the first five or so pages of Google.
If however, your site doesn't appear and you've been indexed (find out if you've been indexed by typing in your domain name on Google) then you've probably been put into the sandbox. It sucks. It really does. There's nothing more demoralizing than having your newly created pride and joy be put in the sandbox before its even had a chance.
But unfortunately, we are completely powerless. I suggest you move on to making another website and keep checking back every now and again to see if the sandboxed sites ranking has improved.
Because there's nothing you can do. I've probably made the sandbox out to be something much worse than it really is. Frankly though, I've only ever had 7 of my sites get sandboxed. Four of those later went on to become profitable sites with no further work from me, two failed outright and one never made it past page three.
So, that's the reality: In total I've only ever had 3 websites fail due to the sandbox out of well... more than 10 times that number of successful websites. So, try not to worry about it. I just felt it was important to mention it, just in case you make a site one day and wonder what the heck's going on.
Alright then. So, to wrap up, in this chapter we've talked about how to get your site indexed faster and how to aid its rankings with some quick `n dirty backlinks from social bookmarking.
You should be more than fine just from submitting a Youtube video and doing some bookmarking. It's only if you wanted to improve a ranking say from 10th to 1st on Google's first page that I might do some more work.
If you do find yourself in that position, I recommend that you make a quick Squidoo page that links back to your site. And finally, we looked at our biggest enemy.
But it does help to speed up the whole process (gets you on Google faster) and will give your rankings on Google a slight boost from the backlinks we're going to gain. The backlinks will help to give our site more `authority' in the eyes of the search engines.
But note that we will not be doing any extensive link building, just some quick social bookmarking really. Getting indexed is important too. Because it can mean the difference between your site getting its first traffic just 2 days after creating it or it taking 3 weeks for the first visitors to trickle in. And the sooner you start getting visitors, the sooner you'll start making money! I recommend that you read this chapter first, and then check out video eight, where I'll show you live how to do everything I've talked about.
Pinging
Pinging is essentially announcing to a list of websites that there has been an update to your blog. It's one of the many advantages a Wordpress site has over a traditional site, and will mean your websites changes are updated in the Search Engines listings.Basically, Google will register that you've made a change and will visit your website to see what those changes were. Now, when you make a new wordpress post it automatically pings for you, but I always still ping it again because I suspect the auto ping doesn't announce it to very many websites
The more websites you announce it too the better. When should you ping? After creating your website for the first time (part 1 & 2) ping it, and every time you write a new post after that. All you need to do to ping your site is visit: www.pingomatic.com, enter your blogs name (probably your main keyword), enter your domain name (don't worry about RSS), hit Check all and click send pings. And you're done!
Integrating with Youtube
There can be no doubt that over the past couple of years, the internet has gone through some major changes. Web 2.0 and so much user generated content has also changed the face of internet marketing. Sites like Facebook, Digg and Youtube have all become household names.And as such, there's a whole load of new internet marketing courses out now that focus almost exclusively on exploiting them. Fortunately, this system doesn't require you to spend hours socializing over Twitter, and it is possible to make ten thousand dollars per month without ever going near Web 2.0. I mean, I've largely ignored the recent changes like RSS etc.
Why? Because you simply don't NEED to use them. And if you don't need them to make more money, then what's the point? Because as I said earlier, remember that at the end of the day, internet marketing is about making money. Not making friends.
That said, some of the key components of this course are based on Web 2.0. Because we can use some aspects of it to our advantage. Our site for example, is built using Wordpress (a blogging platform) and I also recommend that you make a Youtube video.
Why make a Youtube video? I'll start by stating the obvious: Google likes Youtube (I mean, they do own Youtube after all). I'm pretty sure that Google rewards websites that link to a youtube video (especially if it's directly related to the topic of your site) and I'm also pretty sure that linking to your website from your Youtube video gets your site ranked faster Even if the link is `no follow'.
Note: A no follow link is when a website labels a link or a group of links with the nofollow tag. This tells the Search engines `spiders' not to go through that link.
This stops the website that it's linking to from getting the backlink (which would help the sites SEO ranking). So, really nofollow should mean that the link wouldn't help your site get indexed faster since Google wouldn't visit the link and `discover' your site. But I think it does anyway...
I warned you some of the stuff I do doesn't make sense..
Your Youtube video will also bring you targeted traffic, potentially A LOT of traffic. Not only will it bring you visitors from people searching on the Youtube website itself, but in case you haven't noticed Youtube videos sometimes rank very highly in Google's search results. And if you're lucky, your Youtube video will rank on the first page. I've actually had many cases where the youtube video I made has outranked our actual website.
Notice that I said if you're lucky though, because it seems to just be luck as to whether or not you rank. I honestly don't know why some videos get ranked on the first page for a very competitive keyword and why some don't rank for even the most uncompetitive.
Obviously, we try to optimize our video for search engines as best we can, but no one seems to have figured it out down to a Science... yet. Perhaps soon though? As you can see, there are many reasons to make a Youtube video. So, perhaps a better question would be: why not? And the only reasons why not to make one are the time it might take, or that you're unsure about how to make one.
Don't be put off if you've never made a video before. It's really easy (especially my way) and once you've got the hang of it, it takes less than 20 minutes to make the video AND upload it. In closing, I'll say this: Making a Youtube video is the best use of your time when it comes to traffic generation and off page SEO.
In terms of its effectiveness, it trumps article marketing, social bookmarking, directory submission, craigslist advertising and everything else out there. For the time you have to put in, making a Youtube video is more than worth it, and I make one for just about every site.
Making your Youtube video
Ok, so hopefully the last subchapter has convinced you not to skip this part and make a video. So, now I'm going to tell you how I make one and how I optimize it.A lot of marketers I've spoken to seem to be put off by the idea of video marketing if they've never tried it before. And I don't know why, because it couldn't be simpler: All you need make a short 2 3 minute video about a topic.
It doesn't have to be that professional and you don't need to plan it in much detail. After all, you want to seem like a normal person and not an internet marketer. Also, the good news is that the hardest part is already done for us. Where some people might struggle to find a topic to make their video about (they'd want to find something worthwhile to talk about, something they can monetize, and finally a keyword they could rank for on Google) we already have ours... The topic of our video will be our main keyword.
I mean, obviously we want the video to be related to our site and also, why waste all that research we did earlier in chapter one? Also, chances are, that if you were able to make a whole website dedicated to it, your main keyword must be something that's worthwhile talking about for a couple of minutes. So, that's the topic out of the way.
How do you actually make the video?
Well, while you were making your website, you've probably learnt a lot about the topic in question. So, the absolute easiest way to make a video is this: Record yourself talking about the topic. Seriously, just video yourself talking about something related to the keyword.
You might give your story, a review (if your keyword is specific to a certain product) or you could do a kind of how to video - Giving some basic tips that might help the viewer solve their problem. There's really no rocket Science to it. All I do is decide on a general topic for the video, write down a couple of bullet points to talk about, then film myself talking.
Sure, sometimes these videos have a lot of `errs' and `ehhhms' in them, but they work well enough. The important thing to stress throughout your video is that visitor needs to click the link to visit your website if they want to solve their problem. Make sure to mention your websites URL throughout the video and what the viewer stands to gain from visiting it. All in all, I can create a completely new video from scratch in about 10 15 minutes.
It really is that easy. By the way, if you don't have a webcam and microphone, just film it on your phone or video camera and upload that to youtube. Youtube is very accessible and accepts pretty much every file type known to man.
Uploading it to Youtube So, you've made the video, now all you have to is upload it to youtube. I'm not going to go into creating an account on Youtube, there's loads of free material out there and it's pretty self explanatory anyway. So once you've made your account. Log in and on the top right hand side of the screen, hover over the button that says "Upload" and hit `video file'.
On the next page, browse to where your video's located on your hard drive, hit upload and then you'll be presented with the screen below. I've filled it in saying what you need to write in each field.
Now, this is where all of your optimization comes into play, since Google's spiders can't watch the video itself.
Okay. So your video title should contain your main keyword (preferably first). The first thing you need to enter in the description box is your websites URL, you want users to be able to see that without having to click `more info' when they're watching your video.
As far as length goes, you'd think that the best way to optimize would be to write a big long, keyword rich description. But I've found the opposite. Google seems to believe that less words means its more focused on any given keyword and so you'll usually get better results by writing a short description mentioning the keyword once.
Check out most of the videos with 1 million plus views and you'll notice that the vast majority have less than 20 words in the description. Tags. This is the most important part to optimizing your video. Fortunately it's pretty easy to find which ones are best to use: Steal them from other videos. Now, I don't think many people do this, but they should, because it is extremely effective. Here's how to do it.
Type your main keyword into the Youtube search box and it will come up with a whole list of videos, sorted by what Youtube thinks are the most relevant to the keyword. Now, all you have to do is click on the top few videos, look at what tags they're using and steal them for your video. You want anywhere from 5 12 different tags and note that each individual word is counted as a tag. Obviously, make sure to include your main keyword as well as the stolen ones! Next, just select the most appropriate category and you're done!
That's it. You've made a video, uploaded it, and optimized it as best you can, all in under 30 minutes (hopefully).
Remember that once you've finished this section (just one more thing to do) and you're onto part four, to create your `helpful article' page on your website about that video.
Just write a few hundred words explaining what the video is about and embed it into the webpage. Note: To embed a video from youtube into your wordpress blog just go to your videos URL and paste the code from the embed box:
Bookmarking your site
Social bookmarking is essentially submitting a story with a link back to your website to a bunch of `fun' web 2.0 sites like Digg, reddit and technorati. Social bookmarking is pretty big these days and it's easy to see why: It's the easiest and fastest way to get a website indexed and get some backlinks.Bookmarking our website will give us a handful of much needed backlinks (since we won't have ANY others) and will serve to get our site indexed by Google very fast indeed. I would say that this is the most important part of chapter seven, but truthfully, they are all important (I hope you made that youtube video!).
Unfortunately though, bookmarking is a time consuming process. If you do it manually (which I used to) it can take upwards of one hour to bookmark your story to all of the 49 main sites using SocialMarker.com. Naturally though, as with everything in internet marketing, when there's a problem, there's a solution! And there are a few ways to speed up the process... The first is social bookmarking software.
Where a software program automatically bookmarks your site for you. All you have to do is create an account on each of the bookmarking websites once, and it then saves all of your passwords and does it all for you the next and any future times. I know a lot of marketers who swear by these programs but personally I've never had that much success.
Their lists seem to be old and many of the submissions fail (the sites can tell it's a robot or they try to submit to a URL that no longer exists). If you do want to give it a shot though, try bookmarking demon at http://www.bookmarkingdemon.com/ (Tip: Use your own Clickbank affiliate link and save 50% of the sale) Now, what I do, is outsource my bookmarking to another human being. For $5 you can get posted on over 100 different social bookmarking sites, and your story will be posted from an established account on each site.
Anyone who knows a thing or two about social bookmarking will tell you that posting from an established account will bring your stories a lot more traffic. There's always people prepared to do this on the Warrior forum: http://www.warriorforum.com and you can also find guys on all the usual `hire a freelancer' websites like http://www.elance.com Anyway, you'll probably do it manually the first couple of times so here's step by step how to do it. Step #1: Go to Socialmarker.com
Step 2: In the top right-hand corner enter your stories details like in the screenshot below. Then hit Submit.
Step 3: You'll go through each of the 49 sites manually submitting your story and the first time you do it, you'll need to create an account at each of the sites. I recommend you use the same username and password for each website to save time.
I even created a quick email account specifically for bookmarking. Because usually you'll need to confirm your email address = a lot of spam. It may seem like a long winded process but trust me, it is worth it. I guarantee that your site will be indexed on Google within just a couple of days (often in a couple of hours). And the backlinks are also valuable since we literally have none.
Other ways of getting your site ranked If you've spent any amount of time online, then you'll know that there are literally a million and one different ways to get targeted traffic to your website and improve your SEO rankings at the same time. And if you're comfortable using those methods (methods like article submission, forum posting, directory submission etc) then you're very welcome to use them in conjunction with this system.
I actually have quite a few accounts on various different forums on the net (one for each of the main niches) and sometimes I will add my newest website to my signature and make some quick, but helpful posts. It will get your site indexed faster, particularly if it's a high traffic forum. But to be honest, youtube and social bookmarking are the only tools you NEED. I'd only consider other forms of traffic generation/SEO if my site was ranked say 8th on the first page of Google and I wanted to move closer to the top.
In that case I might build a quick Squidoo lens. I'm not going to into how to build one here, but there's plenty of quality free information just a Google search away if you're interested. Everything covered so far here, and some other cool stuff is explained in video eight. So go ahead,
Info The Google Sandbox
Aah... The famous Google Sandbox, truly, the bane of my internet marketing existence, and any search engine optimization based marketers for that matter.I wasn't sure where to put this in the guide, but I figured it was important that I mention it, and the problems it causes. The Google sandbox is our biggest enemy. And other than not accurately judging the level of SEO competition, it is pretty much the only thing that can cause a website to fail. What is it?
The `sandbox' is basically when Google doesn't allow a new website to rank for a certain keyword because Google deems that a new website shouldn't be as `valuable' as an older, more established site. The new website is placed in a kind of `sandbox' separate from the normal search results for a few months. Where, no matter what you do, your site still suffers a massive penalty for being new to Google's database.
The sandbox is a very hot topic among SEO experts and always has been. It has never actually been confirmed by Google, but they have hinted at its existence in several interviews.
Now, the good news is that you won't get sandboxed often, it seems to only happen when targeting certain keywords. The bad news is that nobody knows what these keywords are, or how to avoid your site getting sandboxed.
There's a few theories out there, but take it from me, from our perspective, it's just a matter of luck whether or not you get placed in the sandbox. Google places so much emphasis on a websites age it's crazy.
I don't fully understand their reasoning behind it, but you can't fight city hall (Google pretty much owns the internet) - We just have to face the facts, that now and again, you are going to sandboxed. And there ain't nothin' you can do about it. Fortunately, it is only usually a temporary setback. Within anywhere from one to five months, you should eventually get the ranking you rightfully deserve.
How can I tell if I've been sandboxed?
Okay, so taking awhile to rank and being sandboxed are very different things. It could take anywhere from a day to three weeks for your website to get a decent position on the first page of Google. But after a week, no matter what the situation, you should at least appear somewhere on the first five or so pages of Google.
If however, your site doesn't appear and you've been indexed (find out if you've been indexed by typing in your domain name on Google) then you've probably been put into the sandbox. It sucks. It really does. There's nothing more demoralizing than having your newly created pride and joy be put in the sandbox before its even had a chance.
But unfortunately, we are completely powerless. I suggest you move on to making another website and keep checking back every now and again to see if the sandboxed sites ranking has improved.
Because there's nothing you can do. I've probably made the sandbox out to be something much worse than it really is. Frankly though, I've only ever had 7 of my sites get sandboxed. Four of those later went on to become profitable sites with no further work from me, two failed outright and one never made it past page three.
So, that's the reality: In total I've only ever had 3 websites fail due to the sandbox out of well... more than 10 times that number of successful websites. So, try not to worry about it. I just felt it was important to mention it, just in case you make a site one day and wonder what the heck's going on.
Alright then. So, to wrap up, in this chapter we've talked about how to get your site indexed faster and how to aid its rankings with some quick `n dirty backlinks from social bookmarking.
You should be more than fine just from submitting a Youtube video and doing some bookmarking. It's only if you wanted to improve a ranking say from 10th to 1st on Google's first page that I might do some more work.
If you do find yourself in that position, I recommend that you make a quick Squidoo page that links back to your site. And finally, we looked at our biggest enemy.
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