Custom Web Design & Development in Raleigh, NC

Search engines look at 3 primary factors when trying to understand all of the websites in their index: authority, relevancy, and crawlability. I’ll skip crawlability to keep things simple. Crawlability gets more into the technical side of SEO and ain’t nobody got time for that.

Authority is a measure of how reputable your website is in the eyes of Google and other search engines. Sticking with our pie example, authority is a measure of how big your pie is.

Everybody loves pie, so focus on making yours as big as possible.

Relevancy helps Google to understand what your website is about so it can send the right people to your website. In other words, Relevancy is all about making that 50% of your pie that comes from search engines taste better. Nobody wants a lot of bad pie, so as your pie gets bigger, it becomes more and more important to focus on relevancy.

If you type “cars” into Google, Google will sift through trillions of webpages and order them based on how trustworthy they are, and how relevant they are to “cars”.

SEO is all about helping Google to better understand your website, while also increasing your authority so you start appearing for the search terms that are most valuable to your business.

The easiest way to test this is to go to Google and type in “site:[mydomain.com]” and see if your website pops up. For example, to check if Jlucidelement was indexed, I would type “site:lucidelement.digital” into search engines.

If your website doesn’t pop up after doing this search, then your site isn’t on Google right now. To fix this, add your website to Search Console and submit your sitemap after verifying your site.

Struggling to find your sitemap? Try typing “[mydomain.com]/sitemap.xml” into your browser. In most scenarios, this will pull up your sitemap, or at least redirect you to your sitemap page. If this doesn’t work, then I have a lot of work to do.

Schedule a call and I’ll help you to get started.

You probably got hit with an algorithm penalty.

Google updates their search algorithm every day to provide a better experience for searchers. Part of these updates consists of penalizing websites that go against Google’s rules.

There are two major algorithm penalties that could be hurting your search rankings: Panda and Penguin.

Panda is a series of updates to Google’s search algorithm focused on eliminating “thin” content from the internet. Think articles that scraped content from other sites, or short articles that are 100-200 words.

Penguin is a series of updates to Google’s algorithm aimed at eliminating webspam from search engines. Some classic tactics that could get a site penalized under these updates would be keyword stuffing, paying other websites to link back to you, or getting links from a lot of low-quality websites.

Fortunately, your website can recover. Tell me a little about yourself and I’ll help you identify exactly what happened to your site.