Optimising for the brand new site

Shouldn't the rules be different?

[DarrylParker]

Hi folks. So I launched a brand new ecommerce site like the night before the last real crawl at the beginning of April and we're still stuck in new-site limbo. Our home page and few strange pages like our customer login page are in the index, but our huge lump of content down in our product pages remains untouched month in and month out.

I've followed the rules I've learned her and elsewhere, trying to decompose my site/content structure so that I have pages which focus clearly on a small keyword set and optimise for it well.

But that's not working.

I want people to find my site when they search for "red widgets from Qumar" and I've got a page that targets exactly that search, but it's not in the index. And because I've done such a good job of breaking up my content into easily-indexable and optimisable chunks, the phrase "red widets from Qumar" doesn't appear anywhere else on the site! (Actually, it does occasionally as a natural part of the content, but not optimised for, and on other pages which are not currently indexed!)

The effect of what I've learned about SEO is that my site gets NONE of the traffic flowing around out there for Qumari red widgets.

Then about 3 weeks ago I added a blurb to our home page about a new widget that is about to be released to the market: "Coming Soon to the Qumari Red Widget world! This new red widget from Qumar is blah blah" and the next time freashbot hit my home page, I started showing in the top ten for searches for red widgets from Qumar! It dropped out about 4 days later, so recently I just make sure I change something on the homepage every 3 days or so and we bounce along the crest of the wave....

The result is that I think the brand-new, not-yet-fully-indexed site owner can effect their traffic and sales rates by NOT following the rules of SEO: aggregating their keywords, trying to optimise for many keywords on one page, varying their internal link anchor text....

When I see a deepcrawl hit the site, I can sanitise the structure of the site, refocus all my pages onto their one or three main keywords and refocus back down to the laser beam approach. But for now, while I only have a few barrels pointed at the SERPS, why shouldn't I use the shotgun?

Anyone have comments?

Darryl.

[Stefan]

You might want to be a little more patient and wait for Google to finish finding the site before you throw out the rules; it sounds like you've been approaching things intelligently, why mess things up at this point?

I want people to find my site when they search for "red widgets from Qumar" and I've got a page that targets exactly that search, but it's not in the index

It will be eventually.

Traditionally with Google, over the last couple of years, it would take a couple of months before most of the site would show in the index. Not meaning to to tell you what to do, but maybe you should stay the course, keep doing what you're doing and hang in a while longer.

[JasonHamilton]

Perhaps for the time being this might be a useful tactic for you, but I have serious doubts Google will remain in flux for much longer.

One of my sites was indexed about 2 weeks before the google oddities, and is doing fine with the targeted keywords. I suspect you'll be seeing the end of the tunnel soon :)

[JasonHamilton]

I wanted to add that from my experience, google takes about a month before it starts crawling much more than the first page.

I don't start seeing decent results in google until at least the third month. Any changes I make to a website, I usually sit back and watch for two months before the result of my changes become readily apparent.