When you start a new business and you want (by the way, you should want) to build up a new web presence, there are a few factors you should take good care of. You probably think it is easy to set up a website. Well, think again. Google is becoming pickier and pickier, taking into account more and more factors before indexing a website.

Google looks at the age of a domain as one of these factors and, if you want to make a good start online, you should book and launch your domain prior to launching your actual website.

It takes between 2 to 40 days for Google to index the new domain. Yes, 2 is correct – there are ways, but you don’t need to spend so much effort on that, you should focus more on the quality of the website you are going to launch! Without quality it will take up to 9 months before you can achieve some rankings (unless you get lucky and pull in a few high ranked inbound links).

And if you’ve ever heard of “optimize for Yahoo! and MSN and Google will follow”, that’s more or less correct, if you don’t believe that, as a matter of fact, Yahoo! and MSN are the ones following Google! Yahoo! will give you rankings in its SERPs faster, but… how much traffic is Yahoo going to bring anyway? MSN is the fastest of the three, just because MSN loves new content, while Google loves trustworthy content.

To become trustworthy for Google, here is what you should do:

When you get a new domain:

  • Register your domain for the maximum period allowed.
  • Get a reliable host – no “free” hosting, not unless you want your business to fail or pass as shady.

Before launching the actual website:

  • Create a “Coming Soon” page with some valuable content on it. For example describe what the new website is going to be about, mention an approximate launching date and include contact details.
  • Write a few articles related to your niche and submit them to a few article directories. Don’t forget to include a link to your new domain in your author box. This will get you a few inbound links. Don’t overdo it! Google likes to see “natural” links, so if you have to many links at once, all in the same period of time, Google might consider this “spamdexing” and place no weight on those links. Believe it: you are going to need that weight!

When you launch your website:

  • Write a Press Release announcing your new online presence. State clearly why your new website is newsworthy. Use a press release distribution service to take care of this “buzz”.
  • Submit a sitemap to Google.
  • Submit a sitemap to Yahoo.
  • Submit a sitemap to MSN.
  • Try to get some bloggers to blog about your products, services, website.
  • Are your business ideas revolutionary and your products and services really out of the ordinary? Then use digg.com and other social bookmarking sites to promote them.

Related articles:

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Better Writing for the Web

Bloggers and Public Relations

Are Press Releases Important?

Google and the Similarity Engine

Digg and Social Bookmarking Abuses

To Buy or Not To Buy… Links

Branding on the Web

LSI - Google’s Latent Semantic Indexing

Eight Reasons Why Your Company Needs the Web

Online PR to Increase Website Performance

Online Public Relations Ethics