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Law Firm Sites Blog

Marketing Timing

July, 27 2006
Article by
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Jo Stephens
marketing team

Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN send out little programs called “spiders” to scour the web. These programs fetch web pages and record what the pages say. They also search for links on the web pages and follow those links to more web pages. Hence, building a “web” link (hence the term world wide web, and the idea of a “spider” building it). The best way for a search engine to find your web page would be to follow a link to it from some other site that is already a part of its index. While it is possible to submit your URL to search engines, that is generally not necessary. Google says that it usually finds sites on its own, through the use of spiders, faster than it indexes the pages submitted on an “add URL” page. So when should you start law firm marketing?

The Lawfirmsites SEO for your site includes URL submission to the major search engines, as well as what is called “backlink” building. We will add a link to your site to several sites on our network. As more links are built that point to your site, more spiders will find these links and follow them to your site.

How Long?

Many clients at lawfirmsites.com are curious how long it will take them to be indexed on a search engine. Unfortunately, this is difficult for us to say. Indeed, this is difficult for anyone to say. The Search Engine Optimization industry is a very fluid and dynamic industry. Methods and approaches of indexing seem to change almost monthly. There really is no standard wait-time before your site will start showing up in whichever search engine you are targeting. If you read articles about internet marketing, you’ll find stories of websites that are included after only two weeks. Oppositely, others that didn’t find themselves anywhere on the results pages for almost a year.

What Factors Are Involved?

This variation in timespan depends on many factors. A lot of these factors are confirmed by many professionals in the industry. But, when it comes down to it, they are mostly guesswork. The companies that drive the major search engines do not let out the secrets about exactly how the indexing process goes. Domain name age (how long your domain has been around) has been postulated to play a role, as well as how long it has been registered. Building of backlinks, both in quantity and quality, almost certainly plays a role for most search engines. Probably the most important factor, especially for Google, is which keywords you are targeting.

For new sites that are targeting a highly competitive keyword, Google is known for implementing a procedure called “sandboxing”. Simply it keeps the site out of the search engine results for time periods up to a year. If your brand-new website is targeting a highly competitive term like “beatles CDs”, chances are your site will have to wait several months before it is included in the ranking results. The logic behind this is that google doesn’t want a brand-new site to be built and suddenly take over the top, legitimate, time-established sites that have been there for years–all in a matter of weeks. If your site has been around for 4 years, it’s probably a better site, right? That’s the logic.

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