Why Doesn’t My Website Show Up On Google?
6 Simple Steps to Improve Your Online Visibility.
There are literally millions of websites out there. So every time someone does a search for a word or phrase on one of the search engines like Google or Yahoo, your website is competing with many millions of other sites. That’s where SEO comes into play.
SEO is an acronym for search engine optimization and is a process by which websites are optimized to work better and rank higher in the search engines. The higher the search engine ranking, the higher the listing will be on the results page, ultimately resulting in more traffic to the site.
There are dozens and dozens of SEO techniques used by web developers and consultants, most of which are TMI for most of us. But here are six simple tips you can engage or discuss with your web developer for getting your website optimized:
1) REGISTER YOUR SITE
Most search engines use software applications (called spiders, crawlers or robots) to look for web pages throughout the Internet. Submission to the top search engines will archive your website with them and make it easier for those spiders to find your website. Here is a listing of the top four search engines in the United States displayed in ranking order* along with each respective submit address:
| NAME | RANKING | FREE SUBMIT LINK | |
| 70.87% | Submit Your Site to Google | ||
| Yahoo | 17.21% | Submit Your Site to Yahoo | |
| Bing** | 8.58% | Submit Your Site to Bing | |
| Ask | 2.42% | Sitemap Submission Information |
* According to August 2009 figures from Hitwise
** Previously MSN Live Search
Make sure your submission is done manually. Do not use submission service or submission software. Doing so could get your site penalized or even banned.
2) PAGE TITLES
Within the code of your website contains a label for the page title, which sets the text displayed in the title bar of the browser window. The title contains your keyword phrase, which are the specific words that are searched in a search engine. Sites without title tags don’t get indexed.
Since your keyword phrase is so important to the search engines – and indicative of the page’s content – try to devise a great phrase for your home page and each subsequent page of your site. The phrases should be relevant and descriptive to the content of each page. The engines differ in how much of the title they index, but the general rule of thumb is that the first 60 or so characters are the most important. Do not use the exact same title tag on every page of your website, as the spiders might determine that all your pages are the same and won’t index them.
3) KEYWORDS
Also within the code of your site is a list of keywords, also referred to as meta names or meta tags, that describe what your website is about or specific content in it. They are hidden code read only by search engine spiders. Like your page title, your meta tags should be different for every page of your site if the search engines to store and list them in the search results.
There’s a lot of discussion in the SEO community about how valuable they actually are, but the general conclusion is that you can’t go wrong by adding the meta tags to your pages, and that they still play an instrumental role in meta-based search engines.
4) CREATE A SITE MAP
You want to make it easy for search engine spiders to navigate your website, and a site map will help spiders find all the important pages on your site and understand your site’s hierarchy. Build a site map page and place a link to the site map on every single page of your website. This practice will ensure that the crawlers can easily navigate your website and catalog every page. If your site is large, make several site map pages. Keep each one to less than 100 links.
5) KEEP IT FRESH
Don’t let your website get stale. Sites that have new content added on a regular basis are seen as more reliable to the search engines. This also helps you to increase the amount of relevant content on your site, which also improves your rankings. Search engines will see this as being an active and important website. One great way to add new material to your website is to create a blog, so you can keep your website up to date and also keep your visitors up to date on your business.
6) BE BIG & BOLD
Search engines see larger text and bold text as more important content. Don’t put everything in bigger or bold type, just the important keywords to what your page is about.
XYZ Projects: Developments
“XYZ has mastered the development process”
A primary component of XYZ’s real estate services is the leasing expertise and services provided to the retail properties under management. Leasing services are managed by our in-house experienced team of leasing professionals. Our team is experienced with all types of commercial real estate
One last note… a lot of content and links displayed on a website may not actually be visible to the search engines. For example, Flash-based content and content displayed as images cannot be crawled by spiders. By reducing the use of Javascript, Flash and AJAX on your website will allow the spiders to crawl it more easily.
Try this tool which simulates a search engine by displaying the contents of a website exactly how a search engine would see it: http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php