Your sparkling new website recently went live. It looks beautiful and presents you in the professional manner you really wanted.  The site is even professionally optimized by a search engine optimization specialist, however you search and search and don’t find your new beauty anywhere for the phrases you want to be found for. All this great work and… nothing?

Being fond for desired search phrases goes well beyond the search engine optimization of your website. Listings and rankings are determined by the search engines algorithms and their 200 plus evaluation factors they apply to every website.  Ok, but your website has been designed not to be just a thing of beauty but also to please the search engines algos, so it should be at the top, right?

The search engines are far from instantaneous. Your new site which contains all of the appropriate content and key phrases can take weeks and sometimes months for the search engines to spider each page and update their indexes to reflect the artistry that your website contains.

Here’s why: The search engines don’t search live on the internet, they aren’t truly live searches of every website in the world.  Search engines are large banks of computers that store the data that they accumulate and update it over time as they spider the internet and process every page through their algorithms. These banks of computers are called data centers and are located around the world. As of October 2011 Google was reported to have 40 data centers located in various countries around the globe.  Combined, Google’s data centers are estimated to contain close to 1 billion discreet servers. And in 2008 Google reported that it had indexed 1 trillion discreet URLs. Add this all up and we can begin to understand the internet is huge.  So it takes a considerable amount of time to evaluate, then reevaluate all of the websites that make up the internet, time and time again.

When you do a search on Google it doesn’t go out to the web to find results, it goes to one of their data centers and looks at the historic data they have saved and then generates your specific search results from that data. These search results then make the direct connection (link) to all of the websites on the internet. Each time you do a search on Google it may source your results from a different data center. Considering  that the data centers are never at the same level of updating it’s very likely you will see fluctuations doing the same search from day to day, month to month or even search to search.

The work recently completed to improve the reach of your site in search may be 100% correct and on target to make sure your site is relevant for all of the searches important to you. In time Google and Bing will discover your newly updated masterpiece and list it appropriately in their data center directories.

Once your website is listed for the desired phrases it may rank number 1, or perhaps be down the page, or god forbid on page two or three depending on the competition level in your specific target market.  When a newly optimized site does not instantly rise to the top the reasons can be many including the websites link popularity and trust factor.

Learn more about Link popularity and trust factor using these links:

What is link popularity and why is it important to the rankings of my website?

What is trust factor and how does it affect the search engine rankings of my website?