I am new to all this!

[daverolfe]

Hi everyone. this is my first post on this forum and I would appreciate some straight forward guidance

I have recently created a website for a small sailing association that I am a member of (www.newbridge-nava.co.uk). Despite registering the site with Google, Yahoo and MSN I find that when searching for the site it does not appear, even if searching for 'newbridge-nava'. When i carried out the registration I understood that it can take some time but some time has passed and no results yet.

Chris (on this forum) has suggested replacing a graphics menu with a test menu but i am not sure what he means. Can anyone explain and make a few easy suggestions of what I can try to get our website to appear in the search results.

[ciarac]

Hello,
In my experience it really does take a long time for a new site to get into Google's search results. It's annoying but true.
One thing that, for me, seems to make a difference is opening a webmaster tools account with google (https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=sitemaps&passive=true&nui=1&continue=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fwebmasters% 2Ftools%2Fdashboard&followup=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fwebmasters% 2Ftools%2Fdashboard&hl=en#utm_source=en-et-wc&utm_medium=et&utm_campaign=sitemaps-us-wc) and submitting a sitemap there. If you don't have a sitemap, I reviewed my favourite (free) sitemap program on my business blog which is here. (http://www.website-copy-writer.com/blog/2008/05/03/best-tool-ive-found-for-building-a-sitemap/)
Aside from that, I do think you have to play the waiting game, as far as google is concerned.

But meanwhile, you can still get involved in your genre community by making USEFUL comments on related blogs (steer clear of spammy comments) and taking part in forums related to your topic.

I would recommend also finding a way to add more copy to your website, as the search engines like a website with valuable content, and also, in my opinion, the central logo you have is quite messy looking. I know that's off the subject of getting traffic but when you DO get visitors, they might be turned off by the logo as it's quite sloppy looking. Perhaps you could just tidy it up a little with photoshop?

[TryUsOut]

It takes wekks and sometimes even months to have your site included in their database. A remedy to this would be to build more (dofollow) backlinks from forums, blogs, directories, social bookmarking sites, etc.

Let the bots find their way to you site - works just as well ;)