Well you must have put a lot of work into preparing that website before ending up here. You spent all that time making the background flow with the links, and just guessing, but this was probably more than a side project due to our ever increasing reliance on technology. And now you’ve searched for your website and you are either having trouble finding it on Google or it is not coming up in the ranking you’d like it to. We have a few tips to help you maximize your search engine optimization, but would like to remind you that websites are just like any other investment, in order to increase the traffic you need to give it either time or money.
Can’t Find Your Website?
To those of you that are having trouble actually finding your website on Google, our first recommendation would be to use Googlebot. Googlebot is Google’s web crawling bot (sometimes also called a “spider”). This spider “crawls” through billions of pages on the web to find new or updated sites and uses algorithmic differentiation to determine which pages you’ve searched to add to the Google index. That may have been a mouthful, but Googlebot basically searches tons of pages and lists what it finds in order of importance related to your search. If you can’t find it on there, you may be experiencing one of the next three problems.
- Your website may have been built in Flash or a type of media that isn’t crawlable
- Your website may have a page or text command that prevents robots from crawling or indexing your content, which is generally a common mistake for those who may be building their first website
- Is your website brand new? It may need some time to build up traffic so that Googlebot can find it relevant to your search. This is one of the most common reasons websites are hard to find.
Why Am I Not The First Option On Google?!?
So let’s say for example, you have a surf shop in San Francisco and you want to be the first hit on “Google Search”. It may come as a surprise, but the phrases “surf shops in San Francisco”, “San Francisco surf shops”, and “surfing San Francisco” all have different outcomes. The fact of the matter is that Google’s search pages are extremely competitive Real Estate. Everyone who has used the internet believes that launching a website is the foolproof ailment for any business, but that’s like thinking a 401k is the greatest “get rich quick” scheme. Publishing the site is one step, and generating traffic is another. Like in our example with the surf shops, you have to do some SEO (search engine optimization) and figure out exactly what word you are competing for. You’ll need to get creative with wording it as “surfing shops”, “surfing shop”, “shop surf”, etc. Another step is identifying competing businesses. You’ll find that there is a lot more competition out there for “Surf Shops In San Francisco” than “Surf Shops in San Francisco that sell fish and chips on sunday”.
Last off, you need to be absolutely sure your page is RELEVANT. This brings the whole topic back to your target market. Search engine algorithms run on the principle of relevance. So is your article relevant to just fish and chips, just surf shops, or just vaguely relevant to both?
If you need any specific tips or pointers on how you can reach your target market best, please contact us! We offer different marketing plans that can help you reach all your goals!
Written by Nicole Wilson
