Don’t Rank In Google?
Google is the single biggest source of organic, highly targeted web traffic, if you rank well for what you do and what you sell, or the services you provide, you will receive traffic that is looking for what you sell and wants to buy from you.
If you don’t rank in Google, or don’t rank very highly then there are steps you can take to find out why and remedy the situation.
First things first……
If you don’t have a Google account, set one up and add Google Analytics tracking code to your website header. This will show you exactly what traffic you are getting and where it’s coming from.
You should also add your site to Google webmaster tools (WMT’s) and submit your XML sitemap there.
Webmaster tools will tell you if you have any ranking penalties applied to your website. If you do, follow the advice given to fix the issues highlighted.
If you don’t have any manual penalties listed in WMT’s then you next need to check if your URL is in Google index. Do a Google search for http://www.yourwebsite.com and if you are in Googles index, your site should be listed first in the results. (It might be a little lower in the list if there are lots of well optimized similar URLs.
If you appear for your URL then your ranking issues will be either under optimized content, over optimized content or a backlink issue.
Download and install the SEO Quake plugin for Chrome and use this tool to analyse your page content and keyword density. It offers an easy to understand analysis of your page structure so you can easily see page title, meta tags, headings, text /html ratio etc.
As a rule of thumb, a variation of your main keyword or phrase on each page should appear in your page title, meta description tag, H1 heading tag, page content and within alt text behind images. Vary this keyword or phrase rather than repeating the exact same term.
Keyword density for your main keyword should be around 2% and not much more.
Back-links
Over optimized backlinks or spam quality backlinks are the main reason for poor website rankings. In their enthusiasm to get to the top people often build too many links with exact match anchor text over and over.
It’s very important that your link profile looks natural so use long tail anchors with many different variations of your search terms, and make sure that your Brand and URL are the dominant text used in links.
Junk links are also important, using link text like ‘More’, ‘full story’, ‘click for more’ etc.
Links from link farms, link networks and spam sites will harm your rankings, so if your links aren’t on sites that are indexed in Google then you need to get rid of them.