Expert: John Martin - 11/4/2009

Question
I have a website that gets about 3 visitors a day. Google has indexed only two pages even though I submitted it two months ago and I put about 12 pages in social network bookmark sites about two months ago. That's the bad. The good is that according to google analytics everyone who goes to my site stays there for about 3-7 minutes and visits about 3-6 pages with a super low bounce rate. Can you figure out why the spiders are not indexing my site? I know the meta key words are optimal holisticbetter.com

Answer
First of all, contrary to popular beleif, Google really does not rely on Meta keywords at all.  This may be helpful with other search engines but Google even admits to this.  Their primary concern as to what sites are ranked high or not is that site's relevancy to the backlinks and the content within it  (aka, the site's popularity with other sites).

Your site appears to be fine.  Backlinking is a primary method of obtaining higher ranking but for a site such as yours this would require doing this as often as possible.  And even then, you should not expect your visitor hits to start exploding for at least 4 to 6 months.  Your site has a lot of useful and relevant content to it's topic but you should keep in mind, the more links the better (meaning the more pages on your site the better).  Not only that but the back-links should also have linked text that is relevant to the search term that you are aiming for.  For example, if you want people to find your website by entering "Bipolar Disorder information" in the search engines, then your links should reflect this.  e.g.

<a href="http://holisticbetter.com/">Bipolar Disorder information</a>

Additional pages should also be backlinked accordingly as well...  for example, the page 'bipolar-triggers.html' should be as follows...

<a href="http://www.holisticbetter.com/bipolar/bipolar-triggers.html">Bipolar Triggers</a>

Last but not least, be patient...  just keep working on the backlinks and be sure that those are being placed in locations that are not marked as 'nofollow' links either.  The best way to get a site to receive high ranks is to simply create the site, submit it to search engines, wait about 4 months and then start working on your SEO and backlinking methods.  A good website is like a fine wine... Allow it to sit for a few months.  No amount of backlinking and SEO work will help a site that has not been already in the search engines for a few months anyways... especially not for Google.  the way Google sees it is that many people create sites on a whim and then don't pay for the hosting and it dies out within only a few months.  They like to wait a while before actually taking any new sites serious.  However, if your domain name is fairly old and was purchased some time ago, then working on SEO right now would not hurt anything.