My client is screaming because he can’t find his site on Google and neither can I. I know it takes awhile for google’s spiders to crawl a site. The site has been live for over a week. Am I jumping the gun or should it be showing up by now?
The site doesn’t have a whole lot of content, it’s mostly images. so I added a hidden <h1> tag. Was this a mistake?
The site is hydrocareoftexas.com and I am using ‘hydrocare of texas’ as my search terms.
Here’s what my meta info look like:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<meta name="description" content="HydroCare of Texas" />
<meta name="keywords" content="HydroCare, Hydro, Care, Texas, Houston, Humble, TX, Water Softener" />
<meta name="author" content="Houston Humble" />
And here’s the <h1> tag:
<h1>HydroCare of Texas HydroCare, Hydro, Care, Texas, Houston, Humble, TX, Water Softener</h1>
I’ve tried a quick site:yourdomain search on Google, and sure enough, there are no results. Then I looked at the site itself. There is virtually no text for Google to read, and therefore nothing that can be indexed. If you disable images, the site all but vanishes - all the content (including the navigation) is in images.
[FONT=Verdana]Seriously, that’s your heading? Looks more like a spam-fest to me…
If you went to a page that had that as its top heading, shown in big letters at the top of the page, you’d run a mile. And so will Google.
As TechnoBear says, you need content, and you need proper content. A heading that is actually a heading. Text that is text. Navigation that is made up of readable text. Google can’t decipher images, it can only read text.
Something else to think about is your <meta description>. It isn’t a description. The contents of this tag are what will be used to provide the brief snippet of text beneath the site name in the search results – this should be a short description of the site and what it has to offer. Most search engines will only show about 160 characters, so you’ll probably want to use as much of that as you can to give a readable, human-friendly description of your site that will encourage them to click on the link. (That’s all the description tag is used for)[/FONT]
I’ve made changes to the site. I changed the h1 tag to read “HydroCare of Texas, Water Softener Systems.” I’ve updated the meta description tag to read “HydroCare of Texas, the major breakthrough in limescale treatment.” I’ve added alt and title tags to every image on the site. And I added real text to the home page.
Did I do enough? And how long does it usually take for Google to find a site?
First you check your website cache either Google bots came on your website or not then if bots came on your website after that you need to do on-page techniques
[FONT=Verdana]It’s looking a whole lot better now, you’ve got some actual content there for Google to get its teeth into. How quickly it gets indexed may depend on how many links you’ve got pointing to the site. It would probably be a good idea to register with Google Webmaster Tools; that should kick-start the crawling and indexing if Google hasn’t found another route to the site yet. Usually a new site can expect to be indexed and listed within 2 or 3 weeks, depending on how popular it is.
A couple of quick points – your middle two nav icons seem to have the wrong titles and text – and you might want to tone down the emphasis on Hydrocare of Texas. Realistically, you’re probably not going to have a whole lot of competition for that exact phrase, and given that you’ve got an exact match in the domain name, there’s a good chance you’ll pick up a place in the top few without too much trouble. What you need to focus on is what people will actually be searching for, and the chances are that most of your potential customers won’t be searching for your company name. Over-emphasising your brand name comes across as keyword-stuffing, and Googlebot may decide that your site smells like spam and isn’t such a tasty snack after all.[/FONT]
Better check your navigation buttons there. It’s looking pretty clean now, but I suggest that you add a little bit more. About your client, I would understand why he screamed at you if he doesn’t know how long does it take before a site is actually shown on the search results. It would be a different story if you promised something, though. That’s one of the big don’ts in the world of SEO: you don’t make guarantees that the client will immediately be on the top of the search results, knowing that there will be some competition. Anyway, just keep up the good work on the content for your client’s site. I think that’s one of the things that it needs right now. Another thing would be the overall user experience. By that, I mean would the people be happy if they found your client’s site?
