So here’s the way it works online. Quote me on it. I’ve been watching companies obsess over how to get more people to their websites so I’m going to sum up almost everything I’ve learned in this statement:

People don’t follow companies
they follow information.
If you provide the information,
people will follow you and the companies will pay you for the people.

The center of the online world is SEARCH. Not your website. It never will be. So stop focusing on getting people to your site and start focusing on providing relevant content in as many places online as possible.

So you have a nice blog all set up with nice CSS, you’ve modded it to match your site and you’re making posts. You decide to go and check to see if you are showing up in Google’s index one day using: site:http://www, only to discover you’re not there.

In case you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m speaking from experience. I had my blog pages in the sitemap xml file I sent to Google through my Webmaster Tools, and kept waiting for them to show up in Analytics.

I submitted my blog to Feedburner.

Still nothing.

It turned out that a setting inside of Wordpress under the Privacy tab was the culprit. Even though I had everything correctly set up, I had not selected a checkbox in Wordpress to allow search engines to find the blog. Imagine that! A little check box can make the difference between people seeing finding your blog, and not finding it.

So needless to say, I checked the box. Maybe you should log in to your own Wordpress blog and see if it’s checked.