I'm helping some people start a company on a tight budget. We're doing a pilot launch of the product next month and concurrently building the website. Has anyone any tips for getting it visible in search engines more quickly? Submitting to directories I guess - is it ok just to do the big ones (google/yahoo/bing) for now and leave others to the longer-term SEO strategy? anything else we can do?

Hi Sophie,

There are some quick tips you can do to boost your rankings quickly, I'm not going to pretend that I'm an SEO wizard but I try to keep up-to-date where I can.

With the recent update to the Google search algorithm you need to be careful when trying to 'cheat the system', e.g. if an SEO company offers to sell you loads of links, run away from them as fast as you can because Google have stomped down on this.

What Google does appreciate is relevant content that is getting, shared and talked about online. So simple things like having a presence on social media, a blog, even if it's just to curate content if you don't feel that you're ready for that yet. Anyway, here are a few links that might take you to the answer you need:

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

http://www.eugenoprea.com/boost-seo-rankings-and-traffic/

I hope you find them useful and I wish you the best of luck.

Jaz Blakeston-Petch ~ @jazybp ~

Hi Sophie

I wouldn't bother with directory submission. Two things I'd do to maximise speed of indexing:

1. Make sure your site is registered with Google Webmaster Tools (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/) and submit a sitemap of your site. You can then use GWT to see which of your pages Google has indexed.

2. Get some links, ideally from popular/authoritative sites because Google visits those sites very often (our site every hour at least, for example) and will crawl/index your site by following the link. I'd focus on PR and social media as easiest ways to get decent links. Friends, family, contacts etc...

Hi,

I launched my website three months ago and started seeing sales coming in from within a few days - I receive sales every week and have broken even as of last week.

All my sales come from google, I do NO paid advertising at all.

I will look into it in the future but my set up to start off (as this is a side venture along with my current full time job) was probably similar to you - less outgoings as possible.

I did join up a couple of directories where you can swap links, but these were very specific, have a look at our 'resources' link in the footer of our website - http://www.thinkfavours.co.uk

I think Shobby could help with a link swap - this was free. But like Ashley said;

1. Submit your sitemap to Webmaster tools.

2. Join social media and work on that for a presence - if you don't receive sales from this don't worry too much, probably receive less than 2% from this however this is more about presence and engagement.

3. Concentrate on SEO, there are plenty of articles on this, I read up a lot and used forums etc.

Download 'Traffic Travis', this might help you with things as well.

^ start with those and that will help you on your way for the first few months.

The only thing I paid for was webhosting, domain names and some stock.

I have plans for PR and paid advertising but i have a roadmap and plan to do as much as I can free, break even/start to make profit and see how sales grow/slow/plateau and then move ahead from that.

I hope this helps!

Manish.