One of the frustrations of launching a new web site, or blog, is the time it takes to attract serious organic search traffic.
When you launch with a new domain, you know it’s going to take a while before the search engines start indexing all your pages and giving you the high listings you hope you deserve.
And when you look at the top three search engines, the speed with which they will start taking your site seriously is in inverse proportion to their reach.
While Google, Yahoo! and MSN will all make a first pass of your new home page as soon as their spiders become aware of it, what they do after that point varies a great deal.
MSN, with 13.7% of online searches, is typically the first to start rewarding strong pages with listings on the first page or two of results. (Assuming you have done a good job of choosing the best keywords, have written some strong content pages and have attracted some good inbound links.)
Yahoo!, with 28.7% of searches, will take quite a bit longer before giving your pages the listings they deserve.
As for Google, with 41.4% of searches, they have their notorious “sandbox”, in which your new site will languish for up to six months, or more.
In other words, it takes months before you can start to rely on organic search traffic to build up steam.
What do you do in the meantime?
There are numerous ways to attract traffic – through PR, word of mouth, blogging and more.
But the most reliable and measurable way is through PPC advertising.
If you want to know more about how to drive qualified new visitors to your site with PPC, and without paying too much, you’ll find some useful information in one of our recent research briefs – How to use pay-per-click (PPC) search campaigns to boost website traffic and maximize profits from day one: a 90-day plan.
