I was chatting with a friend, who was telling me about an ex-client of his.
The client had a site re-design by a family member, and though he had done a lot of link building, the website wasn’t ranking anywhere. His site wasn’t even listed in Google. Was the site banned? On inspection, John Zumwalt found the designer had put a robots.txt file on the site, blocking all robots. A simple mistake, but difficult to spot if you don’t know what you’re looking for. Sometimes professional help is what is needed.
If your site is not being crawled by Google or other search engines, here’s a simple checklist to follow:
Check to see if you have a file called robots.txt. This can appear in any directory but is usually found in the root. Either remove the robots.txt or make sure it conforms to the following robots.txt standard.
Search engines crawl the web, following links from page to page. If you don’t have a link pointing to your page from a page that is already included in Google, it is less likely that Google will find your site. Submit your site to a directory, ask a friend for a link, or beg, borrow or buy. It pays to get links from reliable sources, as opposed to link farms, which Google may discount.
The server may be set up incorrectly, your site may contain code that makes crawling difficult, etc. Luckily, Google offers a reporting tool in the form of Webmaster Central. Use Sitemaps and the Site Status Wizard to help determine potential problems.
Google crawls the site but doesn’t find many pages. Check your linking structures to ensure that important pages are well linked. You may wish to use a pyramid site structure to help organize your site thematically. Remove, or alter, duplicate content. Increase the quality of inbound linking, and avoid poor quality outbound linking. See Matt Cutts comments roughly 3/4’s of the way down.
Google can have problems following animated and coded links. It is safest to provide an all HTML version of your site if using Flash. Google is getting a lot better at following scripted links, however, be sure to check with Webmaster Central if problems persist.
It’s unlikely, but possible, that your site may have been banned. Check with Webmaster Central, and if a ban is in place, try submitting a re-inclusion request. Here’s the definitive guide on submitting a re-inclusion request, straight from the horse’s mouth. Essentially, Google wants to know that the problem has been corrected, and it won’t happen again.
Today, many business people talk more about SEO which stands for Search Engine Optimization. It sounds easy if we only hear the name of SEO but in reality, it is really complicated and has many challenges to handle. The good news is without really knowing much about SEO You can still do some simple things to improve your ranking.
Nevertheless, there are many ways to start, as long as we know some basic things which will help us to make full optimization. And here, one of the biggest challenges is to appear in the biggest search engine Google, though there are other search engines available, they grab the lion share of searches. But the question is how to appear high in that search result engine and a single day will not work for sure. This takes time, if anyone tells you different they are lying or selling you a plan that will ultimately get you penalized by Google, and then it is game over.
Thus, there is a need and importance to understand the basic 7 things of SEO as listed below, followed by some good videos which talk about some basic SEO and hope it helps. There is, of course, much more to SEO than what is listed below. But unless you have invested in the tools and the time it takes to learn them, I would leave the “other SEO stuff” for Oklahoma City’s own SEO KRAKEN professionals.
In other words, it is quality content which is basically something useful for your target customers or visitors that you would like to provide them when they visit your site. Without content, there is very little to distinguish your site from all the other 2 billion sites on the web. Google needs content to understand who you are and how to match you to searchers. Searchers need content to understand what you are about. The idea that you can just build a site and people will flock to it and buy your goods, is from a bygone era if ever.
You can create many links to your web site by submitting your site to open web directories, link exchanges, discussions in forums, etc. Links are basically Google’s way of knowing how popular you are. The more links mean you are “popular” and Google rewards you with a higher ranking.
One of the best ways is to join social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. You create a profile on those sites. Post things that people will find interesting.
Just appearing online will not be enough but need to make personal and business friends as much as possible so that your friends and online community will know more in detail about what your business is.
It is not that easy to think and create unique ideas or content since there are many online sources that can be similar but try to differentiate the way you present. You may quote other blogs or web site but you can put them in a way that they had not been used before which may not be original but unique somehow.
Often updating content plays an important role in order to stay in touch with online friends and community. More post, more people will see it.
Spend at least some time every day on social media marketing in person and also I recommend using some tools like FeedBurner and Dlvrit in order to update automatically to your Twitter and other social media accounts. Enjoy watching some SEO videos below, and my hope for you is that as you apply them for your business and blogs, you will rocket to success.