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The time periods for a web page to get crawled by the search engine searchbots range from 2 days to eights weeks on the average. There are exceptions where the time can be much longer. After the searchbot has visited your web site it can take several days or in some cases weeks until the complex process of indexing finishes. You are not dealing with a single server but rather thousands of servers that need to be synchronized. During that period of time your pages may magically appear and disappear. It can be a frustrating process for business owner and search engine consultant alike waiting for this to happen since, done properly, a lot of money has been invested up front.

Most business executives are by nature impatient. They want results now! If you yell loud enough, threaten effectively, or throw enough money at the problem your web pages will appear quicker. They won't. That is to say you could buy a position in a given search engine and appear sooner, but money will not influence how quickly your web pages appear in the more important organic or natural search results.

So what do you do? The first step is education on the front end of the project. And even here you have to be careful because everyone will sit around nodding and not be hearing a word that is said. They will be present when it is emphasized that even being located by a searchbot can take up to eight weeks and then turn around and "beat you over the head" when the site has not been crawled indexed two weeks after it is published.

For consultants, it is important to read your potential client. I say potential client because we recommend that engagements with clients that are not educable are destined to fail and should not be accepted. Employees of a ineducable boss are in a much tougher spot and it is probably time to polish up your resume.

It is interesting because of all the type of projects we have engaged in, Search Engine Optimization projects can be the toughest. You are dealing with web designers who feel they are being paid to be creative and innovative and resist conventions necessary for web usability and search engine optimization. You are dealing with people who think they, because they have dealt with a particular product or service, know better than anyone else what words people use to search for their product or service and ignore the actual search words they are using. There is a massive conflict of interests between the different groups involved with a web site. But the bottom line is that the final design must meet certain criteria if anyone can ever be expected to find it doing a web search.

Again, the most important factor for success is education. There are certain things you just have to do to be successful with the search engines. The steps you have to take may differ slightly between the search engines. But you dealing with a robot that thinks in terms of algorithms. You cannot convince it to think otherwise. You cannot will it or threaten it to think the way you would like it to think or search your site more quickly. And recognizing this fact is the secret to reaping the immense profits available to those companies who place well in Internet searches as opposed to companies whose eloquent web sites are almost never viewed.

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