Secret Guide to Why Your Site Won’t Rank in Search Engines
I’ve had a lot of people over the years asking me what they should be doing to gain favorable rankings in search engines. Most site owners read forums, blogs, etc. but fail to realize that what may have worked for them in one situation (like in forums) may not necessarily work for your website. Before website optimization can happen there are a few things to take into consideration.
The first one is major. At times, website owners forget about technical issues that their website may face. If they try implementing search optimization on top of these major technical issues the results can be pointless. Initially, look into anything that may hinder a search spider from crawling your website. Are there javascript redirects? Perhaps a form requiring a user input info just to enter the website? The list of obstacles that can hinder optimization goes on and on. All of these factors must be addressed before any successful optimization can occur.
So how can you be sure your site is spider friendly? If your website is indexed, look at the cache Google created, then view the text version. This will give you an understanding of what exactly a spider might index. Is your navigation missing in text view? More than likely your navigation menu is powered by Javascript. Although it’s been known that search spiders can crawl Javascript, they won’t execute the scripting. It’s the same basic concept with form fields. Spiders will not enter data into a form field and press submit. Work around solutions can be put into place or a re-design all together may be needed.
Once you have identified and resolved any technical issues, it’s time to start adding keywords to your website. But there is one more problem–What could it be? In short: You!
A situation that I’ve been frequently been exposed to is where a website owners’ thought process involves using keywords that they know from being in the industry they belong to. These keywords might target a small group of users, but do not take into consideration that there could be ten times the audience which might refer to a product or service as something else. Example: you refer to your product/service as the “ABC234 Super Widget Thing”. But the vast majority of potential customers refer to it as “Blue Thing”. Sometimes there can be a disconnect with internal industry terminology versus general user reference. In some cases this is acceptable, but without proper research prior to implementation you could be missing out on a whole separate and new demographic. Talking with your customers can often provide insight and understanding into general key terms.
After your technical issues have been resolved and customer feedback on terminology has been obtained it’s time to implement some of those keywords into action. Imagine that you’ve added 40 keywords on your homepage browser title, description and keyword field. You’ve described everything you’re website is about in the title. Perfect, right? Wrong! Tip: Use no more than 2-5 keywords or phrases per page. The reasoning behind this is that you should be able to describe your overall theme within those parameters. If more are needed, think about creating new pages to describe those services/products. The goal is to rank your entire website, not just your homepage. Using a few keywords will also make creating content for your page a little easier and more readable to users.
Obviously, there is much more to optimization than what’s been stated so far, but these basic steps should at least get you thinking. For the next post I’ll do, we’ll dig a little deeper into some search engine optimization techniques.
