My Coffee Niche Site- Indexed By Google In 24 Hours!

My first niche site, a site featuring coffee pots, came to life on July 12 as documented in my previous post – My Coffee Pots Niche - My First Niche Site. Since then, I’ve done the following so far (in sequence):

• Picked a WordPress theme (still haven’t finalized on which to use)
• Installed the following WordPress plugins:
• All In One SEO – For easy SEO
• Cloudflare CDN – For faster and more secure website. You’ll need to sign up over at http://www.cloudflare.com
• Google Analytics – For site statistics tracking. Google Analytics account required
• Google XML Site Map - Site maps tell search engines about the pages in your website. You’ll need to submit this to Google later on.
• WP Super Cache – Improves the performance of your WordPress site. Not really that necessary for a small niche site, but every little bit helps.
• WP Policy – Creates a privacy/terms and conditions statement for your site.
• Fast Secure Contact Form - An easy contact for for the website that sends you an email on any enquiries.
• Created free blog/web 2.0 blogs – I’ve created single-page sites purely for back link and site-to-site linking purposes. These are quick, easy sites completed in less than 15mins each as these sites offer very easy web templates to use. You only need to put in the text and links.
• Blogger – http://www.blogger.com
• Squidoo – http://www.squidoo.com
• Weebly - http://www.weebly.com
• WordPress.com – http://www.wordpress.com
• Webs – http://www.webs.com
• Google Sites - http://sites.google.com
• Created a Facebook Page
• Created a simple logo header for my main site.
• Researched about the keyword using Wikipedia, manufacturers’ websites, and Amazon product descriptions.
• Created site sub-category pages using long tail keywords. No content yet, just a the category pages and titles.
• Submitted sites to search engines.  Just search for “submitting site to insert search engine here“. Do note that you need to MANUALLY SUBMIT your site to directories individually. There are quite a few “free submission” sites out there, but most of them are spammy.

It seems that it only takes Google 24hrs or so to index and crawl your site. To find out whether your site has been indexed or not, I simply type the following in Google’s search box:

site:yourfullurl

If it shows up, then it’s indexed.

How to find out search engine ranking postion (SERP)?

SERP basically tells you what your site’s position is when people searches for your keyword term or phrase.

Big surprise for me is, even with an empty site, my URL is already listed on the top 20 results on Google! Specifically, I saw my site on the 2nd page of Google search.

You can also use Traffic Travis to cross-check if your site is in the Top 20 sites for your specific keyword as well as how your competitors are doing.

Wow, I don’t know how, but it seems that either my chosen keywords are crap (nobody bothers optimizing for it) or the competing sites aren’t even trying optimizing their sites. My guess is the former hehe.

I still don’t see any of the links I’ve created on free blog sites appearing as back links to my main site, I guess that takes time.

Still, I’m stoked!!! Not bad since I’ve only made the site ‘live’ via site submission yesterday!

However, I’ve also learned that most people actually use a shorter, 2-phrase search term instead of my 3-phrase keyword term so I need to work on that as well.

Just today, I changed the Site Title to contain both singular and plural form of the coffee pot variant. It’s a start.

I’ll be working on writing content and fixing the site template this week. The site should be fully operational by Saturday.

I still need to follow some of the advice given by Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger.com about getting your blog indexed quickly. I’ll work on those today.