So you’ve got this stunning looking website ‘promoting’ your business and your website has been up for months, but for some reason nothing’s happening.
Your website is not ranking in Google at all and you are wondering why is this happening. What can you do to actually be ‘noticed’ in the major Search Engines?
Now, there are many reasons that might be prohibiting your website from being ranked on a major search engine like Google. The question is, what mistakes are you currently making on or to your website that is negatively influencing your rankings?
1. You have probably heard that it doesn’t matter how good your website looks, as there is way more to ranking than exterior. Most people make the mistake of solely focusing on the appearance of their website and not working on the integral parts that search engine spiders look at.
Yes, this means that the animation and flash you are using on your website might actually be one of the reasons why your website is not ranking in Google.
Remember, the first page of your website is almost like a ‘conclusion’. It takes all the parts of your website together and has to tell people that visit your website exactly what you and your company is all about.
This counts for Google as well. When Google’s spiders visit your website, they need to gather the information on your homepage to know what your website is about. Google NEEDS WORDS to INDEX. If you only have some funky flash animation on your homepage, there are no words- No words = No ranking!
2. In essence, for a search engine like Google your website is all about TEXT, WORDS, CONTENT and KEYWORDS. That’s it. If you don’t have it, you won’t rank.
This means that if you are for instance using a lot of pictures / images on your website and not a lot of text, then this will definitely influence your chance of ranking high on Google.
This doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to use images; you can but just make sure that you have enough text to fulfill the spiders.
3. By now you know that you need content and of course with content comes keywords that are RELEVANT to your website and company.
One of the fatal mistakes that people make is that they ‘stuff’ their websites with keywords. This will negatively influence your chance rankings as Google will think that you are spamming.
We all know spamming is bad! There is no need for you to repeat your keyword 50 times in one page of your content and then do the same on your other pages and your meta tags.
On the flipside, to little use of keywords will also negatively influence your chance of ranking as Google will think that you are not even making use of any keywords.
Many would ask what is the magic number of keywords per page? Unfortunately, no one knows the true answer for this. The Internet is full of speculation without any definite answers. The moral of this story: BEWARE of too many keywords and BEWARE of using only a few!
4. One of the MUST’S when you want your website to rank is to have quality links linking to your website. And yes, the emphasis here is on QUALITY links! This of course means that if a quality site is linking
to you, your site also exhibits quality. See the relevance?
Try to get sites that are relevant to your industry and business to link to you. Remember, the more links to your site, the more the Google spiders will ‘encounter’ your site on the net.
One of Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin emphasised in an interview: “…a page that is pointed to by many other sites is important. In other words, external approval raises a page’s ranking.”
5. How many times have you submitted your website to Google for ranking? Maybe too many times?
Try not to submit your website more than once a month. You don’t want to be known as a stalker do you? If you over-submit your website, a search engine like Google might consider it as spamming and ignore your submissions. The best advise out there is to wait four weeks, then search for the URL of your website in the search engines. If the search engines cannot find your website, it would be a safe bet to submit your website again. If the search engines find your website, do not submit your site again, it is not necessary.
Next time when you are wondering why your website is not ranking on Google, take a look at this article and ask your seo company to implement the necessary fixes.
