My Site Does Not Show Up On Google. What Do I Do?

Starting this site, we ensure that pretty much everything from the themes, domain names, and everything else in between were setup. We brought the site up and the URL works just fine. That being said, I searched on Google for “inventyourlife.co” and our site did not appear in the search results. Being new to all this wordpress site and features, I didn’t know what to do so I looked around. To my dismay, I found thousands upon thousands to SEO posts. 

What is SEO?

The idea behind having your site listed on Google and having people find it is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short. All major search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo have primary search results. This is where web pages and other content like videos or photos are displayed and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users. This is especially advantages when the search engines know information about the user for user accounts and history. 

The first thing to do is learn what SEO is and one specific site that helped me a lot is Search Engine Land who specializes in everything SEO. I would suggest using this site to learn more about what SEO is. 

Why does SEO ranking matter?

From the researching what SEO is, something that stands out is that the majority of visitors don’t click past the first page of the search results. So imagine someone searching for your site and it’s listed on the results of the second page, most likely, users will not find it. Having it indexed through the search engines is only the first step, making it ranked higher is the difficult task. 

Why isn’t my site ranked?

There are a lot of reasons on why your site isn’t ranked in SEO. Understanding the reasons may help you figure out how have it ranked higher

1. The website may be too new and Google has yet to index your website
2. Your website isn’t optimized for search engine crawling
3. Keywords are very competitive
4. Website has “no index” tags
5. This website has been penalized/marked/blacklisted and removed from Google

Google has yet to index your site

One of the first things you can do is index your site via Google. If your site is new and doesn’t have any inbound links, it may take longer than a week for a search engine to update search results. 

To index your site via Google, the first thing to do is to add your site to the Google Search Console. In the dashboard, add your site as a property. By doing so, Google will provide you a file to upload to your to your site (via FTP or web file upload interface). Once you finish uploading the file to your site (home), Google will verify your site.

Once your site is verified, it will take a week or more for your site to be indexed. From what I’ve understood, Google may or may not add your site and will not predict when it will be updated. Just keep checking the Google Search Console dashboard.

Your site is too new

Since “inventyourlife.co” is so new and recently launched, it may take up to four weeks for it to begin to show up in search engine results. Having a background in Technology, I was quite stunned that this was the case. It does make a little sense because a lot of sites change information all the time and having something instantaneous might cause issues with users. All you can do is wait if you haven’t indexed your site.

“No Index” Tags? What are those?

It is possible to tell to search engines, through the code, not to index your site or specific pages. From what I found, I couldn’t see much information on this but it’s possible. 

Your site may not be optimized for the search engine crawler

When you submit your site to Google or another search engine, software called a “web spider” or “web crawler” which will go through the internet to look for content. The content that this crawler will use to determine your relevancy is meta data such as tags, keywords, or relevant words.  This is why it is really important to consider what content your pages contain.

Keywords in your site may be competitive

Your site should be targeting a specific audience, and your audience will have specific search terms or phrases that they will search more often than not.  An example would be shoes, people will search for Nike and a lot of people use that in their content. It will be difficult for your content if it relates to Nike.  So, make sure your content has specific keywords that are not common or competitive. Finding any site is pretty difficult so make sure you make your site easy to find by using keywords that are particular to your site. 

Double check your site’s index status

Google may have suspended or stopped the indexing of your site’s index status. Check if they did or not. Additionally, there are other things to do to check your site’s status:

• Add all your website versions
  • Make sure you add separate Search Console properties for all URL variations that your site supports. This includes https, http, www, and non-www.
• Share access with co-workers
  • If you want other people to access your error reports and search analytics in Search Console, add them with the appropriate access levels.
• Submit a sitemap file
  • This helps Google better understand how to crawl your site.
• Learn how to work with Search Console
  • If you read only one document, this is it.

Summary

In summary, these were the things we did to rank up in Google. Keep in mind, the more content you have to post, the more content to rank up in the SEO. Keeping up with posting content, the more people will be able to find specific contents of your site. I hope this helps a little on ranking up in GOogle search. Good Luck!