Why Your Website Isn’t Ranking
Hello, readers and fellow Praxians! In last week’s newsletter, I covered some SEO (search engine optimization) basics, such as keywords and SEO competitors. This week, I want to explore additional facets of SEO.
Crawlers and Possible Issues
Crawling is the process by which a search engine analyzes a website’s content and updates its search results. Bots (crawlers) scan the web, following links and examining various types of content, including text, images, videos, and links.
Why are crawlers important in SEO? If you have technical issues or unclear page titles, it becomes harder for crawlers to understand your content. If crawlers struggle to interpret your content, users will have a harder time finding it in search results.
Critical Issues
Critical crawler issues include broken links, faulty redirects, or other errors that can negatively impact your site’s ranking.
Metadata Issues
Metadata issues relate to the information found on your site. For example, a page title that is too long or missing a description can make it unclear what your content is about, reducing its effectiveness in search results.
SERP features
SERP (search engine results page) refers to the type of results that appear when a search is performed. Common SERP features include:
Images: Visual content
Videos: Video content
Knowledge Panels: Informational summaries
Featured Snippets: Highlighted text from a webpage
Links: Standard website links
Shopping Results: E-commerce listings
By researching the common SERP features for your industry, you can determine what search engines prioritize. If your industry’s search results favor visual content, you should ensure your website includes high-quality images and videos.
Backlinking
Backlinks are external websites or articles that link to your content. The more quality backlinks you have, the higher your domain authority, which improves your search ranking.
Here are some ways to gain or improve backlinks:
Create high-quality content: If your content is valuable (whether visual, informational, or both), other sites are more likely to link to it.
Monitor backlink quality: While increasing backlinks is important, low-quality or spammy links can harm your rankings. Search engines may penalize your site if untrustworthy sources are linking to you.
Competitive overlap: Look at who is backlinking your competition. If someone is linking to one or more of your competitors, then it shows they are generous with linking and already interested in your industry.
Thanks for reading!
