AnthonyYour Website is Invisible: Here’s Why!
So many website owners and digital marketers are constantly faced with the problem of decreased visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). In some cases, they experience a total absence of their web pages in search results on Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
Do you often wonder why you don’t show up on search result pages and do you wish to generate more leads? We will look into it for you!
Search engine and features
Before we get into that, let us take a quick look at some of the features of search engines.
Crawl
Just like a spider (crawler), the search engine searches the internet thoroughly for content. These contents are found through links. Search engine robots (spiders or crawlers) crawl from one page to another looking for recently updated content.
For example, Googlebot fetches a few web pages, and then through the links on these webpages, new URLs are located. The spider hops along this path of links to discover new content. These new contents are then stored up into an index and retrieved later when a searcher seeks information that properly matches the content on that URL. In summary, a website will only show up on a search engine if the search engine crawls on it.
Index
Search engines have a unique way of storing and organizing the contents found during crawling. A page in the index would show up on the search engine result page on the request of relevant information by searchers. It would be in your best interest to know that only contents deemed good enough will be added to the index.
Rank
I’m sure you’re probably familiar with this feature. But for the ones that don’t know, it is simply a way search engines place content on SERPs. Contents that followed appropriate SEO practices will definitely have a high ranking in SERPs.
To get a clearer picture of this, I want you to liken a search engine to a jungle where the animals live by the rule of “survival of the fittest”. In this case, the animals are the web pages, and “fittest” would mean “highly optimized.” Only the highly optimized content will “survive” in search engines.
Major reasons why you don’t show up in search engine
1. Your website is not yet in google index or is too new:
It usually takes a week or more to update the display outputs of a search engine. The reason being that your website is either new or doesn’t have any inbound links. In the beginning, you can create a Google webmaster tools account. After your registration, you can direct Google to your sitemap.xml URL and demand that they re-crawl your URLs. Again, the feature may not quickly be activated especially with a large site.
Instead of creating a Google Webmaster Tools account, you may click this link to add your URL to Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/. It is important to note that Google doesn’t upload all URLs submitted into the index immediately. After your new web is crawled by the spiders, it may take about two weeks or more to get added to the index database.
2. Search engine visibility is discouraged:
In some instances where your site doesn’t show up on search result pages, it may appear that you might have turned to “discourage search engines from indexing this site” by clicking on the dialogue box ignorantly. In WordPress, this function is usually turned on by default.
3. Absent of an index tag:
In this situation, the custom code of your website refrains crawlers and prevents a whole site or specific pages on the site from being seen or indexed. Hence this part doesn’t show up on search pages. Check- HTTP or https://www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt. The presence of user=agent: *discouraged:/ on your robots.txt is an indication of this.
4. Poor SEO practices:
This is another factor that can prevent you from showing up on search engines. Spiders crawl on a site looking out for content relevancy, keywords, and meta contents to rank these sites well and these qualities are products of search engine optimization strategies.
5. Expulsion/suspension from search engines:
A site might be permanently removed or temporarily suspended by a search engine (Google, Bing, or Yahoo) due to certain flaws or breaches of responsibility. The removal could be as follows:
- Sandboxed – a drastic drop in organic traffic.
- Deindexed – domain is banned or deleted from the index
- Penalized – Google quality engineer or automated Google algorithm penalizes pages on your site preventing visibility of such pages to direct search.
6. Competitive/inappropriate keyword:
This applies to the use of keywords with the large market competition or those that are irrelevant to your trade or product. You need to use high-quality keywords if you want to be visible on search result pages.
7. JavaScript/ mega menu:
A site built basically on JavaScript is usually difficult to crawl. The reason is that JavaScript runs slowly on google because of the high work demand it places on google. This is a competitive disadvantage in SERPs.
Hacks to make your website show up on search engines?
1. Carry out an SEO audit: This will show your website status in terms of keyword, on/off-site optimization. Check https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/blog/how-to-perform-an-seo-audit or feel free to contact us here to get in touch with how we can do an audit for you
2. Select relevant keywords that are less competitive, especially for new websites.
3. Find and establish backlinks: organic backlinks would mean that several websites are directing searchers back to your website.
3. Utilize meta-tags: Meta-tags are hidden codes discoverable by Google search engine crawlers. They help increase your keywords.
4. Get your site listed on Google My Business: This helps add your office location to a Google Maps listing with a link to your website.
It is essential for website and digital business owners to seek SEO-based knowledge and skills for improvement in organic traffic which is equivalent to increased sales. The benefits of well-optimized content cannot be overemphasized. SEO creates awareness, increases users’ engagement, increases conversion, and also gives you an authority in the digital market. Follow the steps I have given in this article and let the rewards speak for themselves.
