We are often asked how quickly a new campaign website will appear on the search engines. Sometimes this question is asked before the site is even built!
If you are worried about getting your campaign site indexed int the search engines, you can relax. The major search engines do not require submissions at all. Your campaign websites will be found and indexed through outside links to your site.
The next question then is how to get does one get those outside links, and how many are needed. When it comes down to it, a single link is all the search engines need to find any website or web page. How fast they find that page depends on the quality of the pages linking back. If a link is buried deep on a site that itself is not very popular, then it might take some time for the links to be discovered.
Easy ways to build links to get search engines index to your website:
- Add analytics to your website. Creating a Google account and adding analytics to your website will get your site discovered by Google quickly. Whether it ranks or not is a different story, however. We recommend having at least 5 pages of content on your site, such as your site home page, issue and about the candidate pages.
- Create social media accounts. Creating social media accounts for your campaign and having them link back to your website is a great way to get a few high-powered, relevant links. Not only does this help your website rank for relevant searches, but your Facebook and Twitter accounts will tend to rank as well.
- Press Releases: Create a press release announcing your campaign and submit it to free online press release websites, such as PRLog.org and free-press-release.com
- Share your website to your local media outlets: Newspapers will often create local candidate bios as election time nears. This material is usually online. The downside to this technique is that there may only be a short window of publication time.
These methods will help optimize your website for search. Number one and two should get your site indexed fairly quickly, possibly within days. Avoid paid services or links back from questionable websites.
Do not ‘go live’ or start building out links until your website – or at least your site homepage – is ready for visitors. If your site in indexed too early, you may find that your initial search engine listing might not be very good. You could find that your search engine listing shows a temporary title with an ‘under construction’ description. This will remain in place until your site is crawled again. For new sites, sometimes that can take weeks.
New links to your site trigger search engines spiders to return to your site sooner than they might otherwise.
Related: Political SEO Strategies
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