How you can improve your websites visibility in SERPs.

Both old and new websites can sometimes face problems that prevent them from appearing within the search results of Google, leading to less or even no traffic to your website. It is very important to not only be indexed in search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, but to also rank well within the results of those search engines, for search terms related to your website and business.

With 75% of online users never scrolling past the first page of search engine results, it is important now more than ever to ensure that you can be found in high positions within search engines.

Why can’t I see my website within search engine results?

This is a question that many people first ask us, and there can be a number of different reasons for this. Firstly, if your website isn’t having any activity or isn’t performing as well as it typically would, you should conduct a manual test of your site within Google. This can be done by searching for your website in this format – ‘site:http://www.yourwebsite.com’ or ‘site:yourwebsite.com’. If you find that your site cannot be located within the search results, or even that your website may not be ranking as high as you may like, there are a variety of questions that you could ask yourself:

• Has my site been indexed by Google?
• Does my website block search indexing with “no index” tags?
• Have I received a penalty and been removed from Google?
• Is my site optimised for search engine crawling?
• Do I need to rethink my keyword focus?

We have provided detailed explanations below to help you answer these questions and determine why your website isn’t visible within search engines, or why it isn’t ranking as high as it could be.

Indexing your website in Google

When creating a new website, search engines may take a short time to update their search results, meaning that your website may not immediately be found within the results. This can often be simply because your website is new and there has been no activity, including inbound links to your site.

Although it may take an extended amount of time for new or bigger websites, for your site to be indexed by Google you should create a Google Webmaster Tools account, submitting your sitemap and requesting a re-crawl of your URL’s in the process. There is no specific length of time that it may take for this process to be completed by Google, and they also state that not all URL’s will be indexed, but going through this process will certainly help to get your site indexed in Google, making your website visible to current and potential customers.

“No index” tags blocking your website search index

A “no index” tag is designed to stop your website, or certain pages of your website, from being found within Google. By including a “no index” Meta tag within the HTML code or returning a “no index” header within the HTTP request, your website and/or certain web pages may be completely dropped by Googlebot following a crawl of your website. If “no index” tags have been included within your website by accident, this could be the root of your problems, and so removing these would significantly increase the visibility of your site.

Penalties and removal from Google

As can sometimes be the case, your website may have been removed from Google on a temporary or permanent basis, which can be for a selection of different reasons. Google may feel that your website violates some of their policies or that they need to remove the site for legal reasons. If Google determines that these points apply to you and your website, you may be removed from the search engine.

The first steps to getting back up and running on Google should be to log in to Google Webmaster Tools to find out what the issues are, ensuring that you make changes to counteract anything that may be causing a problem with Google. Some of the most common problems that users face in relation to penalties and removal of their website include duplicate content, removing good quality backlinks from the link portfolio, adding poor or spammy backlinks to the link portfolio and even stuffing keywords into the page content. If any of these apply to your website then you need to make changes as soon as possible. Once you have made the relevant changes to your site, you are then able to submit your website for reconsideration, meaning that you can be back up and running in no time.

Optimising your website to be crawled

Following the submission of your website to a search engine, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, Googlebot is sent out to crawl the site for its content. The differences between a user viewing your site and Googlebot crawling it are quite big, and so you need to ensure that your site is properly optimised for it to be crawled in the most efficient way possible. By focusing on optimising your Meta data with keywords, creating relevant and good quality content, reviewing keyword saturation, optimising alt tags and a host of other aspects of your site, you are sure to be correctly prepared.

Create a relevant keyword focus for your business

When considering the search engine rankings of your website, something very important to implement across your site is a relevant keyword focus that isn’t too competitive to rank for. Firstly, you need to find relevant keywords that receive a high amount of monthly searches, with a low enough competitiveness that will enable your website to rank in good positions. It is very important to strike a good balance between relevancy to your business, high average search volumes and a low competitiveness, particularly so that you can attract the right people to your business.

Ways to increase your online presence

When looking to increase your online presence and your overall online effectiveness, there are a number of other techniques that can be implemented to help with this:

• Operate with a good quality website, fully optimised
• Utilise a thorough SEO audit to see where you can make improvements
• Produce and maintain a good quality backlink portfolio
• Create good quality content for your website
• Write and optimise website Meta data
• Stay on top of industry trends, current keywords and SEO strategies

Taking steps to ensuring that your website is visible to your target audience is the key to achieving as much online success as possible, helping to take your business to the next level. If you would like more information about SEO and how we can help to optimise your online presence, please don’t hesitate to contact us.