Hello,

I'm a bit of a newbie to SEO, and this is my first real attempt at it. My site isn't very old (been up for about 2 months), and the site actually only went "live" about 2 weeks ago, so it's very new at this point.

I want my site to be as reputable as possible, so I plan to avoid using any black hat shortcuts that I might regret later. I'm working on getting some quality back links, and have started a small AdWords campaign to try and drive some initial traffic to my site, and submitted 1 or 2 of my blog posts to Social Bookmarking sites, but other than that I have not done anything.

I'm wondering how long it will take for my site to start showing up in the Google rankings. I have noticed that my PageRank is actually 0 right now. Is this just because my site is so new? Why don't I show up in the Google listings at all? My site is a free advertising network, but in searching for "Free Advertising Network" I don't find my site anywhere on the first 13 pages of Google -- I assume this is because my PR is 0.

How long should I expect to wait until I have a PR above 0? I assume time is a factor.

Any suggestions for a brand new site improving PR and getting better SEO results?

Thank you.

Your results will depend on how much work you put into it. There are many things you can do. Make sure you have Google Analytics setup on your site so you can see where your hits are coming from and what keywords people are using to find you. Submitting a xml sitemap to google along with submitting your site can help a little but it takes much more then that to get on the first page of Google. You can also setup Google Alerts so you can an email when your site gets indexed. Google spiders take time to crawl all the websites out there.

Forget about toolbar PR right now. It's meaningless.

Effects of promotion and optimising. Anywhere between a couple of months to never at all depending on how and what has been done.

promote your site (NOT talking about the backlinks)
MAKE sure that your site should be helpful. so you never lose any visitor.
ACCORDING TO THE MATT CUTTS OF GOOGLE, Nofollow links are as much important than dofollow links.

ACCORDING TO THE MATT CUTTS OF GOOGLE, Nofollow links are as much important than dofollow links.

Finally, words of wisdom.

it depends on what kws you want to rank.. besides google is a long time and continues process.. just keep and promoting your site and you'll definitely see some results..

I personally find that new sites often get a "new website penalty". Depending on how competitive the keyword is, this can last 2-3 months or up to 8 or 9 months and the site can get a further boost at 12 months. How competitive the keyword is can also determine how much of a penalty the site gets.

As a very general rule, I sometimes find that sites targetting the local market (ie not so competitive) can appear somewhere towards the bottom of p1 for a few months and then move up towards the top whereas a site I did for Gnostic Life last December spent 7 months on p7 for a major keyword before suddenly moving to p1 and it is now p1 no2 for the same keyword with not so many links added in the mean time.

I agree with not using black hat.

how can there be a "new website penalty"??????????

If every thing is done properly, it should take six months at least to get results.

I don't think so. It might take a few weeks to a few months.

I've found that I see results, or rather changes in ranking after about 3 months. Google tends to pick up my changes to the site after two weeks and new backlinks anywhere between one week and a month, but they only seem to affect the SERPs after about three months.