Search engines can take 4-12 weeks to index your web site. If after that time you find out that your web pages are not ranked well on the search engines, do the following:


1. Optimize your web pages for high search engine rankings

Optimizing your web pages is a very important step in your web site promotion campaign. Submitting your web site to search engines is pointless if your web pages aren't optimized for the search engines. Most likely, your web site will be listed at position 14,527 out of million search results or search engines won't index it at all.

Before submitting your web pages to search engines, you must make sure that they are optimized for your important keywords and for the special search engine you're targeting. If you optimize your web pages with IBP before submitting, you can be sure that they will get the best possible search engine rankings.

IBP offers two tools that help you to optimize your web pages for high search engine rankings: The Top 10 Optimizer tool and the Keyword Density Analyzer tool.


2. Get high quality links to your web site

Many search engines consider the number of links that point to a web site when calculating the ranking. This factor is called link popularity. Make sure that your web site has a high link popularity. Link popularity is currently the determining factor for a high search engine ranking. The higher your link popularity, the higher your search engine rankings will be. We recommend this free tool to check your link popularity number. In addition, we recommend this tool to improve your link popularity.

Links to your web site should contain your most important keywords in the link text. Our link popularity tool ARELIS helps you to locate potential link partners. In addition, you should submit your web site to many Internet directories and special interest sites. Links from Internet directories and from special interest sites can have a positive effect on the link popularity of your web site. IBP helps you to submit your web site to Internet directories and special interest sites.

3. Be careful with Flash and multimedia elements

Flash movies are a popular way to make web sites more compelling. They are useful if you want to impress your web site visitors or if you offer web design services. Unfortunately, if you use Flash movies, or if you even design your complete web site based on the Flash technology, your odds of getting listed in the search engines are greatly reduced.

Search engines can only "see" pure text. They are not able to recognize text on an image or text that appears as a graphic in a Flash movie. Google advises on its webmaster guidelines page: "If fancy features such as [...] Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site." If you're using Flash and multimedia elements on your web site, you have to make sure that your web site also has readable content for search engines.

Read this online article on how to get better search engine rankings in spite of Flash elements on your web site.


4. Make sure that your HTML code is search engine compatible

Search engine crawler programs obey the HTML standard. They are only able to index your web site if it is compliant to the HTML standard. If there's a mistake in your web page code, they stop crawling your web site and probably forget what they've collected so far.

Read this online article on how to make sure your HTML code is compatible to the search engines.

5. Make sure that you target the right keywords

For a successful online marketing campaign, you have to target the right keywords. If you target the wrong keywords, your web site promotion efforts will be in vain. Detailed information about finding the right keywords can be found.


6. Submit your web site to all important search engines

Search engines must know that your web site exists so that they can list it in their result pages. Use IBP's search engine submission tool to submit your web site to all important search engines. Some search engines will find your web site through links on other web sites. For that reason, it's important that many other sites link to your site (see 2. above).

IBP's search engine submission tool allows you to submit your web site as quickly and easily as possible to all important search engines, Internet directories and special interest sites.


7. Avoid common mistakes

There are many mistakes that can prevent high search engine rankings. We've published a 19 part series in our free email newsletter about the common mistakes why your web site could not be ranked well in the search engines. Please read this article carefully and make sure that you don't make any mistakes mentioned in the article.


A good combination of well designed web pages with much content, a good keyword density and a high link popularity results in high search engine rankings for your keywords. High rankings on search engines for important keywords result in more sales. Note that search engines take some time to index a web site. Most search engines won't deliver immediate results. Usually, your web site will be indexed within 4-12 weeks.

If you want to improve the visitor/sales ratio of your web site, read this online article.