Working with brand new domains & the aging delay
So by now everyone knows that typically if you’re trying to optimize a brand new domain, you’re going to be waiting a long time before you can rank for any competitive terms in Google. Sandbox, aging delay, call it what you will but in the great majority of cases you’re going to be waiting around 9 months before you start seeing your new website show up for any competitive search terms. I’ve also noticed that it seems new sites don’t just come out of the Sandbox all at once. It seems that you come out of it slowly. I’ve worked on optimizing many new domains since 2004 and it seems to me that the 1 year mark is (in my personal experiences) is when I see my sites start to rank for everything I was optimizing for. Month 9 I start to see the site come up for a few terms, even the “homerun” term I’m optimizing for, but definitely not for all the minor terms I’m going for on other pages of the site.
If you’re working on a new website and you want it to rank high for your terms, you’re going to have to earn Google’s trust before you can rank high in the search engines for competitive terms. How do you earn Google’s trust? By focusing on getting links from authority sites that are related to the topic of your website. If your website is about a residential boarding school in California, then type “schools” or “boarding schools” into Google and see what sites show up. Then, do whatever you can to get inbound links from those sites. Remember, if the sites that show up are directories, odds are that those sites are redirected links and those won’t give you any “link juice”. Keep in mind however that poeple are typically going to find your website either through ranking high in the search engines, or through other directories on the web that rank high themselves. If it’s worth it, consider obtaining listings just for traffic sake and not for the link benefit. Obviously, cost is an issue.
Another thing to consider is your overall linking pattern. Search engines like Google want to see a “natural” linking pattern, so keep that in mind if you’re link building with all the exact same text. I’ve had experiences where sites didn’t rank well for a specific term because I over did it with the inbound anchor text. Vary your text or it will be clear that your linking pattern is unnatural. Don’t just use “San Diego plastic surgeon” in your anchor text, use “Cosmetic surgery in San Diego”, “Plastic Surgery clinic San Diego”, “liposuction San Diego”, “breast augmentation”, etc. This is much more natural because not everyone will have the same description of a website and not everyone links to a site in the same way.
If you’re trying to earn Google’s trust, don’t engage in link exchanges with non related sites. Focus on links that will actually benefit visitors to your website. And no, it’s not true that if you link to other websites from your site that you will lose rankings. Don’t worry about “leaking” PageRank, that is “old school”. Your link reputation gives Google a lot of information about your site. You think Google can’t figure out that all your links are reciprocal? Trust me, they know.
Don’t over optimize your site! So all your title tags, H1 tags, alt tags, metadescriptions and your content have the same exact phrase in it. You can hurt your site by over optimizing so don’t go overboard. Older sites have much more forgiveness then newer sites so don’t think because your competitor is doing it that means that you can as well. In the SEO world, all things are not created equal.
I will say I have seen sites that go overboard on link exchanges and similar anchor text and still rank well but who knows for how long? We’ve all seen Google updates that kill the rankings of websites. As the search engine algorithms get smarter, it will be more important to try to avoid those tactics that can potentially jeopardize your site. If you wear a white hat 
