You have this great new website – shiny big images, sliders, videos, blog posts galore, lots and lots of goodies for sale…but all you hear is the sound of crickets. Nothing seems to be happening. Nada. Zippo. Zilch. Bupkus. (Wow. Spellcheck is not a fan of the word “bupkus”.)
So there’s your website – and it’s just sitting there in cyberspace – waiting for eager customers. But nothing much seems to be happening.
Here’s the million dollar question: did you make it easy for search engines to find it and crawl it?
If search engines don’t crawl your site – then they cannot show people your information when they type questions into Google Search like “Patty’s Pancake House in Washington D.C.” or “Where is Fred’s Floral Fantasia?”.
Here are 5 quick steps you can undertake to help the search engines find your online presence and start spreading the word about you to the people you want to reach.
Make your website navigation easy to understand.
- Have a menu on your Home Page that is simple for people to use and gets them quickly to the pages they want.
- Make certain it is easy to navigate back to the Home Page.
Make your Page and Post URLs short – 4-5 words is optimal.
- Shorter URLs are easier to view in the browser (especially for mobile and tablets).
- They’re easier to remember.
- They’re better for social sharing. (ex. A short url is easier to Tweet).
- They’re better for SEO.
Images
Did you know that bots can’t read text on images if the text is part of that image?
For instance – If you take a photo of a stop sign – the search bot cannot read the word “Stop”. But if you layer the word “Stop” onto an image, the search bots can read that. So just remember that if text isn’t in the HTML source for the image as text, the search bots will ignore it.
Tip: When you use images in a post or page on your site be sure to give them descriptions with a keyword. And then use that keyword in the text accompanying the image – this helps it rank higher for SEO purposes.
Speaking of Text
Here’s another thing about text – don’t hide it. If you have a lot of your content cleverly hidden so that people have to hover over something or click a lot of tabs to make the text appear – Google might disregard some of that text.
Find ways to keep as much of your content visible as possible so that the bots can crawl it successfully. What you write for your website needs to be pertinent both to your audience and search bots.
Check for Crawlers
No – not the creepy kind. You want crawlers checking out your pages. If you are concerned that Google is having trouble accessing your site or you simply want to check to find out how Google is crawling a specific URL on your site then just click here to use Fetch as Google.
By employing some simple SEO tactics you can help get your website (and your content) seen by Google and thus expand your reach to more prospects and customers. Having a great website isn’t enough anymore. But having a great SEO optimized website is the first leg in your journey to getting more online traffic and increasing sales.