At www.seoconsult.co.uk we know it can be extremely frustrating when you have spent time and money on search engine optimization services only to discover that your website or pages are still not ranking high or being displayed as you would like within Google. This is bearing in mind that any underhand or black hat techniques have been eliminated and you really have done everything you thought you should. Before you despair and give up on SEO services altogether, consider the habits of the search engines and think what valid reasons they could have for not ranking you as high as they should.
A great way to test if there is something wrong with the way the search engines perceive you is simply to enter your website address in the search box. If you do not rank in the top five then there is highly likely to be something you need to address. If we take Google as an example, then there is actually quite a lot of information you can use from them to gain some insight. When a site shows up within Google’s results pages, prior to clicking on the actual web link you can click on a sub heading entitled ‘cached’. This basically shows you the version of your website which Google last viewed. This is a really good way of checking to see if some parts were not loading properly or were not present. If everything appears to be as it should be then at least you have eliminated one potential problem. There are plenty of free SEO tools out there which can help you find out anything that is standing in the way of your site ranking well.
If your page is not displayed by Google when you search for your company name and/or domain and it is a new site, then do not worry too much, simply return and try again in at a later date. If you feel your site should be established by now then you may need to check you website coding and content. Until your site is established, avoid using over complicated flash images in your content and just keep it simple until you can increase your ranking. Developing an effective link building strategy is vital in helping your rankings to improve.
If your actual website seems to be displaying sufficiently then you can go one step further and check the individual pages of your website. To do this on Google, you follow the same steps as above but just put the word site in front of your web address. The outcome of this should be that Google then displays every single page on your website. If you have a large website then this can be a long winded process; however it is a very good and easy way of identifying if any particular pages are missing. If you do find that there are some obvious gaps then do not worry too much as it is quite an easy problem to fix. In the majority of cases you just need to tweak your internal linking structure and make your web navigation a little more efficient – and bring more search engine optimisation benefit.
Whilst this is more of a check list than a strategy, with search engines changing their algorithms regularly, it does not do any harm to keep on top of how your site is ranking so you are always ahead of the game.