Beating Google Sandbox

By Author: Lyndon Ogden
Total Articles: 14
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I set out three months ago to destroy the myth that despite what you do to promote your business: Google will ignore your website for at least six months due to the ‘Google Sandbox' effect.

Having been a SEO practitioner for years working with existing clients, I new this was untrue and decided to prove my point when I launched my own SEO services website.

Five weeks from launch and I am page two of Google for three of my terms and page one for one of my terms. I full expect to be in the top three positions in Google for all of my terms inside another two months.

So how did I do this conjuring trick? There was no magic, just a little knowledge and lots of hard work. I did not use any black-hat or dubious practices; I used Google's own advice to webmasters to achieve my goals.

In brief, this is what I did:

I chose my keywords and made sure that my website reflected these words in the content and in the Meta descriptions. Unless you make it easy for Google to know what you do for a living you will have a hard time.

My main keywords were SEO Services and ...
... SEO Company, but knowing the competition for these is strong, I decided to put my home town of Leeds in the mix. The potential traffic from Leeds alone could be lucrative and so SEO Leeds, Leeds SEO, SEO Services Leeds and SEO Company Leeds became my target terms.

I had a new page built on my website which had all the usual menu options but I themed it for Leeds. The page is SEO Leeds if you want to look.

Every week I added ten new articles to my site and had my hyperlinks to my other main pages at the bottom. Google loves fresh content more than anything and the internal linking between pages is important for SEO.

I added a RSS feed to my site and then submitted it to RSS Mountain and other RSS directories. This gave a link back to my website and allowed my new content to be picked up worldwide.

Every new article (like this one) was submitted to the major article sites and within the text I embedded my anchor text link. In this case it's obviously the SEO Leeds hyperlink. Article sites get you links, visitors and also the possibility of more links by being published on other websites.

I opened a blog at Blogger.com and deposited the article again. I then visited pingomatic.com and publicized the new post to the blogging world.

Submitted my site to a couple of hundred directory sites via a cheap piece of widely available software.

Bought a good piece of software from G-Lock that finds blogs on any theme and lists them in page rank order. By dividing the number of posts into the page rank I decided which sites to go to and leave a comment with my back-link. Because Google loves blogs, this has been a superb way of raising my visibility. Make sure that you only visit the ‘do follow' blogs.

As I write, I only have 297 links showing in Yahoo! but they are good quality links rather than the spammed dross which is quite often the norm.

In a nutshell, I guess the secret to my success is to keep adding new content to your website as regularly as possible and then use the new content in as many ways as possible.

No short cuts, no black-hat maneuvers, just a focus on my goal, a little knowledge and lots of hard work will do it for anyone.
Lyndon Ogden is the Managing Director of Your SEO Services. A