So, how visible is your business website on search engines? Is your business website doing good on Google SERPs? The purpose of having a business website is to make sales and generate revenue for the business.
But the fact is that the purpose may not be realised if your business website is not visible on major search engines.
Are you on the first or second page of Google search? These are sort of questions you will need to find answers to for better search engine visibility.
How visible are your website’s pages to the search engines like Google?
Making your business website visible to search engines
If your competitors’ websites are more visible on the search engines than your website, then they will surely get more web traffic than your business website.
It’s imperative to ensure that your website is fully optimised on 2 main levels – onsite and onpage. Eliminate the critical issues that can harm your website’s visibility.
Good read: 5 Essential SEO Techniques That Can Make Your Small Business Website Works
#1). Analyse your website for blocked contents
At times, the reasons why your business website doesn’t show up on search engines like Google is because some of your website contents have been mistakenly blocked from search bot’s access. Check if all important content is not blocked.
Check your robots.txt file, it might be restricting access to search engine robots that crawl the web and indexed pages on your website. These bots are automated, and before they access pages of a site, they usually check to see if a robots.txt file exists on the site and whether it prevents them from accessing certain pages.
#2). Optimise all page elements
Another thing is to ensure that all your page elements which include titles, descriptions, images, text and others are optimised for search engines. Always use short and straightforward page titles and make sure that your page description contains at least a searchable keyword that’s relevant to the page content.
Also, always make sure that images on your website have alt attribute because it is used to describe the contents of an image file. According to Google, the filename can give Google clues about the subject matter of the image. Try to make your filename a good description of the subject matter of the image. For example, my-new-black-kitten.jpg is a lot more informative than IMG00023.JPG.
#3). Fix broken links
Fixing broken links will help your website lots. Dead hyperlinks on websites are not just annoying – their existence may cause some real damage to your online business as well as to your reputation in the Internet.
Broken links kill your business because when customers search for a product on your site dead weblinks will prevent them from finding things/pages they are looking for.
It also has negative impact on your website’s ratings with major search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. Therefore, looking for broken links and fixing them will help your website as it improves your site usability.
#4). Get rid of duplicate content – Google hates it!
Duplicate content is a huge topic in the search engine optimization (SEO) space. When there are multiple pieces of identical content on the Internet, it is difficult for search engines to decide which version is more relevant to a given search query.
If you have products that are similar, it’s always good to differentiate them a little bit with words like red, blue, big, small, black etc.
#5). Control the amount of Flash elements
Too much of flash contents are not good for search engine. When search robots crawl your website they will only read your html contents. They don’t know how to read flash elements because they are not designed for that task.
So if you have too many flash elements, it’s possible for them not to be indexed and if they are not indexed, then they will not be visible on search engines.
Solution tips
Not sure how to identify and fix the above issues? You can use website auditing tools to analyse and improve your website.
Analysing tools such as WebSite Auditor can help you; create a project in WebSite Auditor (the specially designed on-page and site structure tool) and let the software collect the necessary data for you – you’ll even get optimisation advice in plain English.
