The theory is that Google puts new sites in holding period until they’ve aged enough to warrant consideration. First of all, this is definitely not how it works, but it’s quite possible that new sites are “untrusted” at first. Many sites get a page rank quick. However to get trusted, it takes a lot longer and hard work.

The biggest reason why new sites have a hard time getting ranked is that they should have a hard time. Their competitors have had years to establish their site on the web. A long time to build links, write content and keep the site active. I don’t know of an easy way to overcome this, but I don’t think it’s inevitable that you must wait a year or two to get trusted. I launch new sites with my clients all the time and we have seen this behavior during the last few years. In short: Work hard and don’t give up.

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” Thomas Alva Edison.

Links from such sites may be worth nothing to some search engines. Google publishes an approximation of their PageRank score through the Google Toolbar add-on, so you’ll see a lot of emphasis out there on forums talking about “high-PR” links and that sort of things. There are only a few good ways to get honest natural links.

For some people, it comes down to buying, bartering, or actually earning an editorial link. We know which ones are most valued by search engines and buying links is a “No No” for all search engines. So stay away from sites that sell links. It’s not impossible to get the best and honest kind of links, but you do need to think and work a little on it.

My general approach to link building is based on the concepts of authority and trust, like anyone’s would be. We all want more natural links from sites that are as authoritative and trusted as possible. But we can’t measure these things directly.

A good start to gain popularity and some inbound links to increase your Authority level, is by writing original, unique and valuable articles in your blog. Then submit each permalink to sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Mixx, Propeller, Delicious, MetaFilter. I will give you more tips later, but this is a very good start. Stay tuned.

To a search engine, a page that isn’t in their results is a page that does not exist. So, if you’re pointing links at pages that aren’t getting indexed, the PageRank is passing out through those links into the ether. Therefore, it is important in the long run to know which pages are getting indexed and which aren’t. Then you should take steps to improve your index penetration. In the long run, you’d like to have your entire site indexed. The first step is checking to see if you’re getting indexed at all.

To Improve your index pentration you can do the following exercise. Take one of the pages from your site that’s not indexed at all, and link to it from a couple pages that are in the index. Wait a couple weeks, and check back to see if your page has moved into the search results and if your page is now “cached”. Then you can repeat the process to bring more pages into the search results.

To know if a specific page is indexed, you will need the google toolbar installed. After installing the google toolbar, visit the page you want to check if is indexed, for example “yourdomain.com/my-articles/search-engines/” and on the toolbar click on “cached snapshot of page”. If this is your first time through with the fast start process, don’t get hung up on indexing just yet. You’ll have plenty of chances to revisit this article, after you’ve done some work to develop and optimize your content, build links and tweak your design.

If the keywords appear in headings, page titles, and other important spots on the page, a search engine will see this as more relevant than a page where the keyword appears once in the middle of the page. In addition to positioning, link popularity and other factors contribute significantly to your page’s ranking. Since there will usually be a good number of pages that have just the right mix of relevant keywords and position, link popularity makes a good “tiebreaker” for search engines to use when ranking pages.

Closely related to link popularity is “link relevance” and weighting. This means that a link to your “New York Real Estate” page from a page that actually contains those words is more relevant than a link from an unrelated page. The text used in the link itself is very important. Google’s “PageRank” system is the best documented, and most discussed, of the search engines’ link analysis methods. Basically, Google’s PageRank is a quality of web pages. Every page has some level of rank, and it flows from one page to another through links.

The amount of PageRank that flows from a page is divided between all the links on that page, which mean that the more links that point out of a page, the less PageRank flows through each link. PageRank comes to a page from incoming links. So the more relevant links you have pointing into your site, and the more popular the sites linking to you are, the better off you’ll be. The more pages you have in the index, the more PageRank you have within your site. As I’ll explain later, you can take some control of how PageRank flows within your site, which can help you boost the profile of your the important pages in your WordPress Blog.