Have you ever asked yourself: “Is it even possible for my website to rank?”
It never ceases to amaze me how many people we talk to each month who have a website that, no matter what they do, will just not rank at the top of the search engines.
There are many reasons why a website will not rank for its keywords but the most commons problems I come across are normally to do with the way the website itself has been built. There are many ways you can build or have a website built for you but few people (even web developers) understand what impact the build can have on your site’s future performance.
Websites that are built in the following formats will always struggle to rank in the search engines and therefore attract no natural traffic. These formats are:
Adobe Flash
Websites built in Adobe Flash normally have a lot of bright design work or moving imagery and the content is embedded in these images. This is where the problems lie. Google cannot read images. Google reads HTML code – and a website built in Flash has little, if any, HTML code. So when Google visits the domain and tries to crawl the site, it finds nothing, as there is no code there. This means the Google bots leave the domain and don’t index it for anything at all because quite simply it doesn’t know what to index it for.
Frames
This is a particularly old way for a website to be built but there are still many web developers out there who are building these sites without letting their clients know of the implications of building a website in this way. A website built using frames will basically be a site full of pages that are made up of images. This means that, as with a Flash site, Google will visit the domain and have no code to read. It will just leave and not understand the purpose of the page and therefore will not create any relevance for the website.
Now here’s something you won’t want to hear. If your website is built completely in Flash or uses frames, and your business will be dependant on it ranking well and attracting high volumes of traffic, you will need to get it rebuilt. The eventual cost of a rebuild will be dependent on how big your site is and its functionality.
However, there are other reasons why your website may not be ranking and the good news is they may not be too expensive to correct. Some websites do not rank because although they may be built on a platform that is perfect for optimising, they may have one of the following issues:
No Onsite Optimisation
This means your site has no relevant content or isn’t utilising the meta data, page titles or header tags properly. For more information about how you can do this, please read one of my earlier posts by following this link.
No Index Code
So many websites have a simple piece of code added to their script which basically says “no index”. This means that when Google is visiting the domain, the code tells Google not to index the website (and Google basically does as it’s told!). Until this code is removed, Google will continue not to rank your site.
The bottom line is that without having a good understanding of different web platforms, basic HTML coding and onsite SEO. your best bet will always be to seek the advice of a reputable online marketer who will quickly help you identify the problem and advise you as to the best way of remedying it.
Good luck!