4 Reasons Your Site Isn’t Ranking

This is a guest post by David Sinick.

When I first started working online, I didn’t have much faith in SEO. I was misled, misinformed, and misguided. Nothing I tried seemed to work – the highest I ever got in the search results was on the 6 or 7th page.

After a LOT of studying, and some fortunate connections (mainly, my business partner Tom), that is no longer an issue. We are frequently able to rank sites within 2-4 weeks in competitive niches – and SEO now comes easy to us.

In our time working with clients and customers, we find people having the same struggles that I used to have when I was starting. From working with these people we’ve found that there’s really 4 main reasons why people can’t rank their sites – indexing issues, quality and quantity of backlinks, low quality content, and poor on-page optimization.

Let’s go through these 4 issues, and hopefully by the end of this post, you’ll have a better feel as to what you need to do to get your site ranked in the search engines.

1. Indexing Issues

First and foremost, one of the simplest issues that people have are indexing issues. This is when Google can’t crawl your site and can’t find your pages. It’s easy to check if your pages are indexed, just go into google and search “Site:yoururl.com” for example, if David was checking to see if his site was indexed, he would type in “site:DavidRisley.com” into Google. If the search query doesn’t return any pages, then you’re in trouble!

The way we make sure that there are no indexing errors is by using a tool called Google Webmaster Tools. It shows you if there are any pages that have crawl errors, and gives suggestions as to how to fix them. It’s a great way to work WITH Google, instead of against them, and setup your site the way they want you to (so that it ranks better).

**Sidenote: In WordPress, sometimes there’s a security setting checked off that prevents your site from being indexed, make sure that it’s not improperly checked, as this has been the downfall of many sites!

2. Quality & Quantity of Backlinks

Without backlinks, you’re fighting an uphill battle to rank in Google’s search results. You might be able to rank for a few keywords without backlinks and just strong on-site SEO, but when you’re trying to rank for high volume, high competition keywords, you need to build backlinks. The key to linkbuilding is consistency, and high quality.

**TIP: Use Yahoo Site Explorer (while you still can, they are closing it down soon) to look at your competitors backlink profiles, and try to get links from the same places where they have gotten theirs.

3. Low Quality Content

This is becoming more and more important as Google continues to make algorithm changes. If you aren’t aware, Google recently rolled out an algorithm update called “Panda” which focuses on removing low quality “content farm” based sites from the top of the search engine results. Google is focusing more and more on high quality content (as when people find high quality content using Google, they are more likely to use Google again for searching, generating more ad revenue for Google), so it’s important to take that extra time to write higher quality stuff. Your blog should not be filled with spun content or articles that have the reading level of a 5th grader.

**TIP: Having images and videos in your articles shows Google that you’re putting effort into your content, and is a quality signal. Also, having the “like”, Google “+1”, and StumbleUpon buttons on your site (and getting people to click on them) helps content quality as well.

4. Poor On-Site SEO

Here’s where I think the most opportunity lies and where people mess up the most. First off – on-site SEO is basically setting up your sites structure so that Google knows exactly what your site is about. If your site is about dog training, it’s setting up the components of your site so that Google clearly knows that it’s about dog training, and that they should be ranking it for dog training keywords.

If you don’t set up your on-site SEO properly, then Google won’t really know what you’re trying to rank for, and therefore not rank you. It will also diminish the effect of your linkbuilding efforts, in that they will be less effective because it’s still kind of unclear what your pages are about. You’ll find that the only search traffic you get is for your domain name or the keyword of your domain name – which is unfortunate, because you’re missing out on thousands of visitors that Google WANTS to give you. As I said before – Google wants to send its visitors to high quality content so that they have a good search experience and use Google again – think of it as doing your potential customers a disservice by making it harder to find you in Google!

Fortunately, on-site SEO fixes are quick and not time consuming in the slightest, can be quickly implemented on older content (It took us less than 2 hours to fix 75 blog posts), and their benefits last for as long as your site is online.

And even more fortunately, we’ve got a whole guide that tells you how to do it! My business partner Tom and I recently created a guide called The WordPress SEO Blueprint that will show you everything you need to know about getting your WordPress site optimized, and crushing your blogging competition. You can find it over at TheWPSEOBlueprint.com.

So check it out – and let us know if you have any questions in the comments section!

David Sinick is an online entrepreneur living out of San Diego, California. He runs multiple online businesses – his main one being his SEO company Beast Media, LLC.

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Little Comment From Dave (the other one):

Doing my due diligence for you guys, I had David send me a copy of the WordPress SEO Blueprint. This is a REALLY great reference – especially for bloggers using WordPress. It contains tons of actionable stuff to improve your SEO, with step-by-step lists on how to apply it to your site (with screenshots). Quite cool. I’m going to be going through it myself to see what I’m missing here at DavidRisley.com. Highly recommended to you as well.

David Sinick is a cool dude, too. We met at Continuity Summit recently and we did dinner. He knows his stuff, and he’ll take good care of you.