If you are like most business owners of a website, you have probably commissioned the site from a web development company who gave you a creation that probably fitted some, or, if you are lucky, all of your requirements.
It probably looks professional and fits in with your corporate branding, but your site might not be performing as well as you thought it would.
You probably do not realize that there are a couple of interesting things about your website that you might not have known before, that will give you an insight into why your site is not performing that well in the search engines.
The first thing that you might want to find out is how much the search engines know about your website! You do realize that the search engines send out programs to visit your site and read the pages of your site? These pages are stored by the search engines so that they can be presented in the result pages when people look for information. If your website pages are not stored by the search engines, people will never find your website through the search engines. In order to find out whether your site pages are indexed in the search engines, you can go to Google, for example, and type in:
site:your-website-url
(remember to replace ‘your-website-url’ with the actual domain name of your website!)
This will bring up all the pages that are indexed for your website. If nothing, or only one page, comes back then you have a problem!
The second thing you might want to check about your website is its Page Rank. Page Rank is an indication of how important Google thinks your website is and it ranges from 0 to 10, with 0 being least important and 10 very important (only a couple of pages on the internet have a Page Rank of 10!). To check the Page Rank of your website you can type a search into Google for ‘check page rank’. Any of the first couple of results will take you to an online tool where you can type in your home page URL and your site’s Page Rank will be returned. Please note however that you only need to be really concerned if your page rank is undefined, 0 or 1. Most websites can do pretty well with a Page Rank of 2, 3 or 4 – the most common range for Page Rank. If your Page Rank is Undefined, or 0, you need to call in the services of an SEO expert to take a look at your site and see why the Page Rank is so low.
You Page Rank might be low because you have so few other sites linking in to your website. This is the third thing you can check for your site – how many other websites link to you. A link is like a vote for your site, generally speaking, the more links you have to your site, the more votes you have for your site and the better your site will do in Google. In order to check the links to your site, you need to use Yahoo.
Google does not publish all the links coming in to your website, only Yahoo gives a relatively accurate count of the number of links. In order to check the number of links coming in to your site therefore, go to Yahoo and type in:
link:your-website-url
where, of course ‘your-website-url’ must be replaced by YOUR website URL.
This will show you the number of links coming in to your domain. If this number is very low (below 100) then your site is probably not performing well in the search engines. You can get links to your website by submitting your website to some high quality web directories (NOT search engines) as well as writing a couple of articles or guest blog posts.
