Search Engine Timescales - Dare I call myself a newbie?

[dave21]

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Hi,

Just looking for a little advice search engine timescales, but in the recent climate of unrest between the newbie and the experienced, I wonder if this will be shot down in flames… …Anyway, I’ve been making my shop directory site now since around February and have got a fair way - It’s serviceable but it is by no means finished yet. Lesson learned so far is - listen to the advice and stick to something smaller for a first project!!! However, I’m still excited and the fun factor remains moderately high (maybe 7 out of 10).

One of the first things I did was registering my domain with goggle and any other search engine I could find with a ‘submit a site’ function. I’ve heard that it can take a long time for a first site to get fully registered within the searches and so wanted to get ahead of the game there. Since then I’ve kept on posting content on to the site in the hope of getting the search engines to notice me.

I expected that it’d take an age before I seriously got indexed within the major searches, but to my surprise I quickly got registered within MSN (although I did submit it to the MSN beta so that may have helped) and just last weekend Google appears to have fully accepted my on to it’s books. Not made any money yet and traffic is unsurprisingly very slow, but to me this is a small triumph.

So here I am, on the search engines (apart from Yahoo) but just not ranking high enough to get any real traffic. I know that along with continuing with the site I now have to start optimising pages for the search engines etc, and I’ve read enough to have a good stab at that. But here comes the questions that some of you may be helpful enough to share your experience with…

1. Although I’m indexed and badly ranked, but continually being crawled, am I too young for search engines right now and should I forget about SEO for a while?

2. What sort of timescale is good to notice a difference in your rankings after each optimisation? i.e. once Google re-caches the pages, is that long enough or should I wait until you all yell “re-index”?

3. If I do nothing, can I expect my positioning to be static or volatile over the next few months? So until Google really gets to grips with my site, could I expect that any changes to my position could be equally down to my attempts at SEO and Google being fickle?

Hope I’ve explained the situation well enough and would really appreciate and advice / experience.

Thanks,
Dave.

[Lea]

In my opinion you should not forget about SEO for now - although there is a so called "sandbox" with google for new domains, I have had new ones come up high quick.

Some of my sites (the big and busy ones) get updated often, yet the smaller ones don't. I would not even hope to predict ranking updates really.

What I guess I would wonder... is what have you actually optomised your site for exactly? You seem to be trying to cover an area that is well covered ... unless u have gone niche shops?

Lx

[thirdlight]

Good question, Dave.

Google seems to be up & down like a yo-yo (or similar) at the moment. I would suggest keep plugging away, & don't worry about it too much.

Concentrate on getting quality inbound links - useful from SEO point of view, but don't forget that people follow links too. If SE's aren't sending you traffic, let other sites do the job!

Have a go with GoogleRankings to see what your site is currently "optimised" for, and go from there...

Good luck