You must insure that the search engines have a great "first impression" of the site. Make sure it is complete, or nearly so, before inviting them to have a look. Broken links and pages with little content will force them to consider a site unworthy of ranking well. Your desire is for them to be impressed with what they see with their first visit. Oftentimes, if that first visit is not impressive, the search engine will almost quite literally put the site on the back shelf for a while. It may be sometime before the search engine even returns for a second look. Do not let that happen to your site!



Showing a new site to the search engines which has clean code, an easy-to-follow linking structure, and LOADS of great, original content offers the best chance of having the site rank well. Of course there are no guarantees. However, there is no reason to sabotage any chance the site has by promoting it too soon.

While I am on that topic, submitting a new site to a dozen or so good directories is mandatory. As you probably already know, submitting directly to the search engines does no good. It is imperative the engines find the site's link on other sites...the more the better so long as the linking sites are of high quality.

There are services which will submit new sites to good directories for a fee. Otherwise, simply find directories by doing searches on your own in Google. If the home page of the directory has page rank at all, then that directory has some respect by Google and would be good to submit to. Be aware that although the home page there may have page rank, the page your link appears on after submission may have no page rank; that is fine if that is the case. It is common for internal pages to lack page rank for a while when they are part of a very large site.

Buying links on private websites is not suggested for this process. Most sites which sell links include a no follow tag on the link. This tag basically tells the search engines that the sending page is not vouching in anyway for the link. This type of link does your site no good. Additionally, NEVER participate in those offers which promise to generate hundreds or even thousands of incoming links to your site. This is considered spamming by the search engines. You do not want your site associated with such things.

Gaining attention and relevance in the past often involved what is called reciprocal linking. Now days, search engines are wise to this and understand that sites were swapping links with each other regardless of any benefit each of the sites' visitors received from the link. Basically, the search engines realized that the reciprocal linking strategies were simply a way to "game the system" to obtain better rankings. Little can be gained now days by trading links with other sites.

A new site needs some quality, one-way links in order to build credibility. Since many of the better directories are human moderated, they never allow spam type sites in their listings. Since the search engines have been trained to expect that only good quality sites are linked to by those directories, being included in that list gives your site some instant creditability.

Most directories do not charge for inclusion. However, some with higher page ranks do. It is fine to pay for this type of inclusion as it involves human moderation and will insure an inclusion in a good directory.

In closing, follow the steps involved in creating a quality site which includes plenty of content and then spend the time required to gather as many incoming links from directories as possible. Once your site is ranking well in the search engines, other sites will find it and some will naturally link to it as well.