Diagnosing reasons for poor search engine ranking

Updated April 2008
You know the feeling, your site has been live for a year or more but somehow it just never does as well as the competition in search ranking - in fact come to think of it you have never seen it on page one or two...let alone in the coveted number one slot.

Your web designer tells you that you need to start spending money on pay per click, but do you? Take a look at the following common reasons for sites not ranking well in search, take a look at your site and work it out for yourself.

Is your domain/website less than six months old?

It takes time to achieve ranking and new domains have a kind of probationary period when it is hard to get a good ranking. If this is you then take a good look at the rest of the points below and get yourself into shape with a carefully planned search engine optimisation campaign.

Has Google crawled your web site yet?

You can find out whether your site has been crawled and when it was last crawled by going to Google and entering in your full domain name in this format www.sitestogo.biz. If the site is not returned in the search then it is not being indexed at all. If it is returned click on the 'cached' link to see when it was last crawled. Check it was no longer than a month ago. If you are not being crawled
submit a Google site map (if you have a SitesToGo website then your site map can be found at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml, then check that you have at least one high quality link from a regularly crawled website - see our list of Free Internet Directories for suitable sites.

Do you have sufficient valuable and up to date text content on the site as a whole?

Basically sites are ranked on the value of their text content and if yours is largely graphics and has poor content that is never updated, your site will never do well on search. So if this sounds like you - get yourself an updatable website and instigate a regular programme of adding timely useful information to it.

Do you have all the key search terms targeted on each of the pages of your site?

Google will return in a search only pages with all the terms used and on average now people search using 3 or 4 words. If one of the words is geographic like updatable websites Ireland and Ireland is not on the page in text then it will never come up. Tip: have your full contact details including (County) and Ireland on the footer of each page

Has the page title and meta data content description been completed correctly?

These fields should be completed individually for each page and include target search terms for that page as well as correctly describing the content of the page. See our guide What is meta data

Have you as many high quality links coming into your site as the guys in the number one slot?

Websites linking to yours (especially to deeper information pages) indicates to search engines that you have worthwhile content. Check your own link popularity against the top ranking site. Find this and other tools on our Web marketing tools page

Is your site accessible to search engine crawlers?

Check the deepest page of the site to see if it is being crawled (see above) then put your site through an accessibility check
Remember that search engines cannot submit drop down searches and don't like to crawl pages with complex urls, watch out too for flash or javascript navigation, and you wouldn't dream of owning a website built in frames nowadays, would you?

Are your pages too slow to download?

Google admits that page size matters. Apart from missing out on the less than three second attention span of site visitors, heavy pages can now cause your AdWord advertisements to be placed lower in the ranking. This makes sense from their point of view as clicks mean revenue and one click that takes forever to download the page will reduce the number of clicks and the revenue. Possibly the same applies to organic search. Try to keep landing pages below 70kb. Check your page sizes here.

Still not sure why your site is not performing? Then call us or send us an Evaluation Request or just call us now.