Google Woes - How to get indexed?
A client contacted me earlier this week to ask why they'd not yet been picked up by Google.
Unfortunately there’s no correct answer for this and we never guarantee that we’ll get you to the top of Google, just like John Kettley can’t guarantee that you won’t need your umbrella tomorrow afternoon when you pop out for some milk – it’s far too unpredictable.
There could be a whole host of issues that Google's having finding and indexing the site, and Google has no obligation to inform people what these are or why they're not listing a site, so we’re doing our best to get them on and up the Google search listings ladder, here’s a few tips to give sites a kick start.
- Think of your website as an island, you need a way to get onto the island in order for Google to index it, to achieve this, add links to it from any other web presence that's relevant, for this client it was their ebay store and their blog. It's really important that you don't use link farms, Google will see this and view your site with increased suspicion, possibly even removing it.
- Submit a sitemap to Google, this will help Google to index all areas of the site.
- Look at the first page, are your targeted search terms on there? If not, how can you incorporate them into the wording? If you can get them in as paragraph headings than that's even better, don’t go overboard, if the page doesn’t make any sense to a human, Google will likely ignore it.
- Finally, wait, Google indexing takes time. Late last year I changed isndesigns.com to target obtree web development rather than a jack of all trades approach, it worked for me, but it’s a really small market so the competition wasn’t too fierce.
- Make sure all HTML is valid and the site's well formed, this had been done during the build but can be lost as the site's updated by users.
Finally, Google offer some really good tips, read them and use them
