Here are some tips to that you can use to figure out and fix why your websites not ranking in Gooogle’s search engine results also known as the SERP.
1. Webmasters
Signing up for Google Webmasters allows you to see what’s going on with your website. You can get data about you site like how many pages have been indexed, what errors your site is receiving, and other tools that will help your website be the best it can be. One of these tools is a sitemap submission tool.
2. XML Sitemap
Having a sitemap allows search engines to quickly crawl your website. This allows Google to see what pages you have on your website. If your not using WordPress you can generate a sitemap here.
If you are using WordPress then you have it easy, by using plug-ins like yoast SEO or Google XML Sitemaps. Don’t forget to submit your sitemap in your webmasters account.
3. Site Speed
Google wants to provide quality content as quickly as possible, so if your site speed is slow then your content may be getting pushed to the back. You may want to read our article on how to speed up your WordPress website.
4. Keywords
Keywords are the words that people type into search engines to find websites with content that match what they are looking for. Doing some keyword research you can focus the traffic coming into your site. By doing this research you can get better optimize your content for search engines. Don’t just use one keyword, but a group of related keyword, for example:
- snow board
- snow boards
- snow boarding
- snowboarding gear
A great place to do keyword research is through Google’s keyword planner.
5. Quality Content
After doing your keyword research you’re going to want to use them in your content. Google’s not just looking for keywords, but it wants to serve webpages that best answer the query. So don’t go stuffing keywords into worthless content, take the time to write something unique.
6. Heading Tag
Like every body only has one heart, so should your webpage only have one h1 heading tag, and like your body the heading is the most important tag on your webpage, it should contain your keyword while catching peoples attention in the SERP. For most websites your heading tag is used for your permalink and search engines check the relevancy of your heading to your content.
7. Robots.txt
One of the first things search engines do when crawling your website is to check your robots.txt file. This file notifies search engines what should be crawled on your website and what you would like left out.
- If you have something like the following in your robots.txt it’s probalbly why your not showing up in the SERP.
User-agent: * Disallow: /
8. Backlinks
One of the main ways that search engines determine where you should rank in the SERP is through backlinks. By having quality relevant backlinks it shows search engines that your page is popular and contains quality content. This may take time, but writing quality content will help. If you don’t have any links coming into your site you have less of a chance to rank well.
9. Google Plus
Creating a Google plus account is a great way to get your content indexed, as it is a Google product Google crawls it more efficiently and more regularly than it would your site. So creating an account and posting to it after you’ve written some new content with a link back to your site can get your content indexed almost immediately.
- Site speed. If your sites loading slowly search engines are going to penalize you.
- Webmasters, signing up for webmasters allows you to see what’s going on with your site.
- Write quality content that relates to your keywords
- Check your backlinks
- Keywords
- Title tag h1
- robots.txt
- Google plus
- Create backlinks
