If your web site is not ranked on search engines, take a look at the following tips and techniques. Search engines need some time to pick up new web pages. They have to visit your web site, they have to scan your web pages and they have to reflect the changes in their indexes. Most search engines need four to 12 weeks to index new web pages.

• The following list includes the most common reasons for bad search engine rankings. We highly recommend that you read this list to make sure that you have eliminated all factors that might be preventing good search engine rankings for your site.

If your web site consists of only one or two optimized pages it will be difficult to get good search engine rankings. Search engines try to find web pages that offer valuable content to web surfers. Your web site should have at least six pages and each page should have at least 200 words. Search engines need text to index web pages.

If at all possible, avoid frames. Many search engines have difficulty with frames and it is very difficult to get high search engine rankings for web sites that use frames.

Most search engines cannot index Flash pages. The normal text content on your web pages matters most to search engines. If you must use Flash on your web site, make sure that you also offer normal text for the search engines. Text in Flash elements is invisible to search engines.

Some web sites use a "Welcome to our web site" image with a link to the actual site as the index page for the web site. Don't do this. Some search engines might not follow the link on the welcome page and your index page won't contain any useful content for search engines. In addition, most web surfers don't like these welcome pages.

Your web page should be hosted by a reliable hosting service. Otherwise, it could happen that your web server is down when a search engine spider tries to index it. If your web site fails to respond when the search engine's index software program visits your site, your site will not be indexed. Even worse, if your web site is already indexed and the search engine spider finds that your site is down, you could be removed from the search engine database. It's essential to host your web site on servers that are very seldom down.

Search engine crawler programs that index Web pages don't have much time. There are approximately 4-6 billion Web pages all over the world and search engines want to index all of them.

So if the host server of your Web site has a slow connection to the Internet, you may experience that your Web site will not be indexed by the major search engines at all. You may also want to limit the size of your homepage to less than 60K. It will also benefit the still numerous users that connect to the Internet with a slow modem. For even the casual Internet user, the performance of a Web site can make the difference between pleasure and frustration.

Select "View source" in your web browser to take a look at the source code of your web site. Some web pages contain so much JavaScript code and other HTML commands that the actual content is hard to find. If you cannot immediately see the content of your web page when you view the source code, then it's likely that there is so much additional code in your web pages that search engines stop indexing the page before they come to the actual content. Use external JavaScript code and external CSS code to make your pages as short as possible.

Don't use text in the color of your web page background and don't stuff obscure HTML tags with your keywords. Search engines don't like to be tricked. If you try to trick search engines, it's likely that your web site won't be listed. It's better to design your web pages so that they are beneficial for all: web surfers (who find what they're looking for), search engines (which get better results) and you (who gets the customers).

If the web page you submit contains a redirection to another web site, most search engines will skip your web site completely. Do not submit a redirection web page. Many webmasters tried to cheat search engines with redirection pages in the past. The search engines companies discovered that and they decided to totally skip web pages with redirections. Submit the actual web page that contains the content of your site.

Databases and dynamically generated web pages are great tools to manage the contents of big web sites. Imagine you'd have to manage the web site contents of the New York Times without databases. Unfortunately, dynamically generated web pages can be difficult for search engine spiders because the pages don't actually exist until they are requested. A search engine spider is not going to be able to select all necessary variables on the submit page.

Some search engines can index dynamically pages to a point, but even Google states that they have problems with dynamically created pages: "Reasons your site may not be included in Google: Your pages are dynamically generated. We are able to index dynamically generated pages. However, because our web crawler can easily overwhelm and crash sites serving dynamic content, we limit the amount of dynamic pages we index."

Imagine you're an Internet marketing service company and you keep trying very hard to get top rankings in the search engines for your customer. Even after several weeks, the customer's web site hasn't been listed in any search engine. Then you see that your customer blocked the search engine spiders by not properly configuring the robots.txt file.

Search engine spiders don't have the functionality of full-fledged Web browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox or Netscape Navigator. In fact, search engine robot programs look at your Web pages like a text browser does. They like text, text, and more text. They ignore information contained in graphic images but they can read <IMG ALT> text descriptions.

This means that search engine spider programs are not able to use Web browser technology to access your site. If your Web pages require Flash, DHTML, cookies, JavaScript, Java or passwords to access the page, then search engine spiders might not be able to index your Web site.

Most search engines have problems indexing web pages when their URLs contain special characters. The following special characters are known to be "search-engine-spider-stoppers":

* ampersand (&)

* dollar sign ($)

* equals sign (=)

* percent sign (%)

* question mark (?)

These characters are often found in dynamically generated Web pages. They signal the search engine crawler program that there could be an infinite loop of possibilities for that page. That's why some search engines ignore web page URLs with the above characters.

If you have difficulties getting high rankings on Google, the next section is for you.

Many web site owners wonder why their web sites rank well in Yahoo and MSN but not in Google. Why is this so and what can you do about that?

Of course, you should use IBP's Top 10 Web Page Optimizer to optimize the content of your web site for Google. If the content of your web pages isn't optimized, you cannot have good rankings on Google. 

In addition, it is very important to get many incoming links to your web site. Google heavily relies on incoming links. If more than one web page is optimized for the same keyword, the web page with the best incoming links will get the best ranking on Google. Make sure that the links to your web site contain your keywords.

As mentioned before in this manual, it is difficult to get high search engine rankings with an optimized web site that doesn't have good incoming links. It's also difficult to get good rankings for an un optimized web page with many incoming links. Optimized content and incoming links complement each other. It is important that your web site has both.

In general, brand-new web sites with new domain names need about six to eight months to get top rankings on Google. 

The usual process is that Google indexes the new web site, lists it for some less important queries and then the web pages drop from the search engine result pages for several months. Although other search engines list the site properly, Google doesn't list the web site, sometimes not even for the company name.

If you have a brand-new web site, don't worry about this. You are not necessarily doing anything wrong. Google delays the inclusion of new web sites. This phenomenon is called the Google sandbox.

It seems that Google delays the inclusion of brand-new web sites to encourage webmasters to build content instead of building mini-networks.

Many webmasters try to artificially inflate the link popularity of their web site by creating a network of small web sites with different URLs that all link to each other. Many of these web sites have no purpose other than linking to the main web site.

By delaying the ranking of new web sites, this mini-network strategy doesn't offer a quick jump to the top anymore. The delay might encourage webmasters to focus on the content of their main web site instead of building useless mini sites.

If you have a new web site, expect that your web site will be listed within six to eight months in Google. Add content to your web site, get good incoming links and make sure that your web pages are optimized for Google.

As soon as you have a domain name, create a temporary page and link to it from another web site to make Google aware of your web site. The six to eight months delay starts with Google's first contact with your web site. The sooner Google knows your web site, the sooner you'll be listed.

Yahoo and MSN don't have such a delay so don't focus on Google alone but also optimize your web pages for these search engines.

• Google delays the inclusion of brand new web sites. Optimize your web pages, get good incoming links and start your web site promotion activities as soon as possible. Google will give your new site the rankings it deserves. Just give it time.