It's one of the most common questions that new or would-be webmasters ask, which is understandable given that most Web traffic starts with a search query. Unfortunately, it's also a question that has no easy answer, not least because it depends on a multitude of factors. One thing is for certain is that it's not going to happen overnight, and it's not likely to happen within the first few weeks or even months of your website being live. You can manually submit your website to Google so that it will be instantly added to the search giant's index, but it will hardly make much difference. Google's robots are constantly crawling the Internet for new content, prioritising well-established and popular websites over those with minimal content or those that are on new domains. However, Google's multitude of complicated and largely unknown ranking factors are beyond the scope of this article. What matters is that it will crawl your website automatically, typically within a day or two of it going live. You can also submit your sitemap to the search engines although, again, this doesn't make much difference. In fact, you can safely ignore submitting your website or sitemap to the search engines.

Content is king. It's a cliché that any Internet marketer has no doubt heard a hundred times and more to the point it's become downright tedious. Worst of all, it's not even entirely true anyway. In fact, it entirely fails to address the fundamental way people interact on the Internet. Every marketer knows that online content has become the lifeblood of modern marketing strategies, but not everyone seems to understand that fact that Web content is very different to that designed for print.