Carl’s SEO & Web Design Blog

One of our specialties is helping people get good listings in the search engines. You can have the best web site in the world, but if nobody knows you are there you have wasted your time and money. We often hear the words from clients “Nobody is visiting my web site. How do I fix that?” Here are the top reasons we see why people don’t get good web site rankings in the search engines.

Weak content on the entrance page.
You entrance page should have a word count of about 300-500 words. This should give you good keyword density on multiple keyword phrases that relate to your topic with no overworking of any specific phrase.

Graphic overload on the entrance page.

The search engines can’t see graphics or Flash for ranking. That splash screen may look cool, but it’s worthless for ranking purposes. For the graphics you do use, be sure to include an ALT tag so the search engines know what it is about.

Weak or few incoming links

This is particularly true with Google. Don’t fuss so much over a good PageRank (some people think it’s a red herring now). Instead, focus on getting good incoming natural links from trusted sites. Major news sites and EDU sites are almost all trusted. I like the story of the guy who sold ads on his site for $1 a pixel. Soon the major news services picked it up and he had links to his site from those stories. Creative ideas like that can spawn a good rank with no work from your end building unnatural links.

Unreliable host

There are some hosts out there that will sell you cheap or free hosting for your site; but all they end up doing is advertising that you are unprofessional and a cheapskate because the hosting is unreliable. In addition, they can’t give you any ranking because the search engines know these domains are bad news. Check the list of bad hosts that have sent us illegal spam at
http://www.creatingnewworlds.org/stopspam.cfm. You will see some big names on the list, like Comcast. We strongly encourage our clients never to use any of these to host their web sites. One client we have used a reliable host but also used Comcast as their connection to the host. Comcast assigns IPs dynamically, and soon an IP listed commercially as a bad IP was assigned to their email. Guess who the client hassled? I spent a lot of time trying to get Comcast to fix this and found them unresponsive. You want a reliable, fast host with good support. The hosting we sell fits this definition.

Using dynamic linking
What this means, in simple language, is that you should avoid any URLS between your pages our into your pages that use URLs that contain special characters such as =, ?, &, or $. Although the search engines are better at processing these than a few years ago, they still spell trouble and cost your ranking.

And if you are looking good in Yahoo and MSN but bad in Google:

Remember the Sandbox

Google puts all new sites in a sandbox or testing area for 6-8 months. There’s no way to avoid this. Spend this time building your links and quality content. Then, when Google wakes up, you are ready. Don’t expect quick high rankings with Google.

Build those links
Incoming links from quality sites are VERY important in Google. Build good links over time in a natural process.

Want the longer list of why your site isn’t ranked? Order our SEO book!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 15th, 2006 at 9:07 am and is filed under Google, Web Design, Search engine optimization, Internet Marketing and Promotion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.