Is my site listed in Google? That’s a question that I often get asked by clients after their websites have recently gone live.

Take the following situation.

Your new business has been in operation for a couple of months. Trade has been good and now that your new website has been live for a  couple of weeks ago you’re expecting to see trade take off as soon as people start to find the site and start using the online shop.

But, so far, you’ve searched for the site on Google using various keywords and you can find no trace of it. Why? Has the site been listed at all on Google? Or has it been listed and none of the pages been high enough for you to see them?

The way to answer the first question is to simply type into the Google search box site: followed by your website’s url. For example site:www.yoursite.co.uk. You will then get a listing of all the pages that have been indexed in Google.

If this is zero then your site hasn’t yet been listed. If your site is new then it could be that it just hasn’t been found by Google yet. If it’s more than a three of four weeks old though and still not listed, ask you web designer to look it.

If pages have been listed then you know that they are not yet high enough to be visible. If your site is new, give it a little more time. If it’s been around for more than a month or so and still not visible then get together with your web designer and ask him to investigate.

If you don’t get satisfactory answers from your web designer ask a third party to take a look at the site.