Friday, October 30, 2009

What Could Be Causing Your Website To Not Rank well On The Search Engine Pages

By Leonardo Endo

It could very well be depressing at times to find out that your website is still nowhere to be found on the search result pages despite trying to put strong effort at optimizing your website well for the search engines. You may have been reading a lot of materials lately, both physical books and ebooks at the same time and yet your face continues to do nothing but frown each time you check at the progress of your site's search rankings. The big question now is, just what could be preventing your website from getting up there on top of the search engine pages?

Of course there are several factors to consider when optimizing a website to rank well on the search results. But do you know that there are some very common mistakes most website owners are doing without even being aware of? Here are some of those major mistakes:

Leaving out the webpage title tag blank

Did you know that second to the quality and quantity of links pointing to your website, the title of your page is another very critical factor that search engines take very well into consideration when determining how and where to rank your website for on the result pages? Yes, you read that right. The title of your page is one of the most important things that will determine your site rankings. No matter how perfectly you optimize for the other parts within your webpages, if you don't have your keywords in the title tag, then you have a much bigger disadvantage compared to your competitors with well optimized title tags on their site. You should always make sure that you don't leave out your page titles blank, be sure to write your keywords in there.

Putting more emphasis on web design rather than the content

This could be a vague claim. To explain this on a more precise manner of speaking - when you create websites to impress people, the most probable thing you would make sure of is to make the look and feel of your website as perfect or attractive looking as possible. The tendency is, you hire a good website developer and ask him or her to dress your site with the best looking layouts and sparkling graphical designs possible. The problem starts if your developer knows nothing about SEO and simply follows your request. Although it is possible to gain favor in the eyes of people, you may not get very good feedbacks from search engines as they put more value on the content of your website rather than the design. If your website is heavily loaded with complicated graphics but very little textual content then your website rankings maybe doomed to appear nowhere. Remember, content is king on the internet. So never compromise the way search engines value your website by trying to impress people with your site's fabulous appearance.

Not having a specific target keyword or topic on the site content

Just like a nomad who has no particular home to rest his feet, search engines regard websites that talk about almost everything under the sun and has no specific subject to talk about, in that same manner. Let's take the grocery store as an example wherein you will find things organized per section according to brand or product item. This is of course so that people can easily find what they're looking for. If you do your grocery quite regularly, then there could be a big probability by now that you know exactly which section of the grocery store you should go to when looking for a specific product. Would you go to a section where there is a variety of different items in there rather than a soap section if you're looking to buy a bathing soap? Same way goes for the search engines when determining which set of keyword niches to rank your webpage for if your page focuses on no particular topic or keyword.

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