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Desperate need of SEO help! (24 posts)

  1. morerockin
    Member
    Posted 3 years ago #

    Hello all,

    I am having trouble getting a SEO like All in one SEO to work for my website. When I do a google search for my website or a yahoo search, I do not get a single hit!

    I have grown astronomically frustrated. Can someone please help me?

    Thanks

  2. Roy
    Member
    Posted 3 years ago #

    You've been online for 11 days? It usually takes some time before Google finds you, but once that's done, things will get better.

  3. morerockin
    Member
    Posted 3 years ago #

    Ah ha!

    So I am not doing anything wrong? Maybe just wait a month or so and I'll be ok?

    I have the XML Sitemap generator on my site too.

  4. bpendleys
    Member
    Posted 3 years ago #

    It takes more than waiting. You need to build links to your website from other websites.

  5. morerockin
    Member
    Posted 3 years ago #

    It takes more than waiting. You need to build links to your website from other websites.

    I am a newb and I am not sure what that means.

  6. bpendleys
    Member
    Posted 3 years ago #

    There is quite a bit of stuff to do with SEO. Go here and look at this page: What is SEO.

  7. morerockin
    Member
    Posted 3 years ago #

    Yes, but what does it mean to build links to your website from other websites in specific regards to wordpress.org

  8. bpendleys
    Member
    Posted 3 years ago #

    It means that you contact other webmasters and ask them for a link to your website.

  9. bpendleys
    Member
    Posted 3 years ago #

    I just visited your site and have one suggestion. Use the Permalink feature in WordPress. That will give you clean urls. So, instead of the url looking like: http://eyesonthelies.com/?cat=7

    They will look like this: http://eyesonthelies.com/rep-manzullo-questions/

  10. iridiax
    Member
    Posted 3 years ago #

    If you are worried that something is wrong, sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and then verify your site. Google uses this service to notify you if they notice problems with your site or if their web crawlers encounter errors.

    http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools

  11. morerockin
    Member
    Posted 3 years ago #

    Good call! I am doing that now. Thanks

  12. morerockin
    Member
    Posted 3 years ago #

    Ok, just setup the Google Webmaster stuff and put a meta tag on my site which it did verify. I also submitted my XML site map.

    I guess I have to wait for it to index.

    Any other advice?

  13. iridiax
    Member
    Posted 3 years ago #

    It will take a while for Google to visit your site and report any errors. If you have access to your site logs (not every web host offers this), check them for visits by Googlebot (Google's main web crawler).

  14. morerockin
    Member
    Posted 3 years ago #

    Still waiting for Google to come through . . it has been 8 hours.

  15. slylake
    Member
    Posted 3 years ago #

    there are so many factors that govern when google will visit like santa claus that it is not funny. So, bear in mind this will take some time.

    I will advise the following simple SEO tips for wordpress:

    Firstly, create yourself a robots.txt file. The amount of sites out there trying to raise their ranking without one is ridiculous.

    So, create a file and name it robots.txt and place this in the root directory of your site.
    If you want google and all other robots to crawl like crazy put the following in the file:

    User-agent: *
    Disallow:

    If you want a robot to not index a particular part of the site, then your robots.txt should have something like:

    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /images/
    Disallow: /mysecretfile.html

    etc etc etc....

    in wordpress speak, this might be a way you wish to go:

    Disallow: /wp-admin
    Disallow: /wp-includes
    Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
    Disallow: /wp-content/cache
    Disallow: /wp-content/themes
    Disallow: /trackback
    Disallow: /cgi-bin
    Disallow: /search
    Disallow: /feed
    Disallow: /rss
    Disallow: /comments/feed
    Disallow: /feed/$
    Disallow: /*/feed/$
    Disallow: /*/feed/rss/$
    Disallow: /*/trackback/$

    Now, I recommend two plugins for your site:

    SEO Title Tag
    Google XML Sitemaps

    Both very easy to install and configure. The title tag will allow you to configure your own more search-engine-friendly titles for pages. This will help the search results...
    The sitemap is self-explanatory.

    I would also strongly recommend turning on permalinks. the ?=1 stuff is not search engine friendly really.

    And of course, you will need descriptive, well designed text on your site to cater towards possible search strings. People are never going to search for your site directly if they don't know it exists already.
    Remember that an image heavy site is not search-engine friendly. Bots crawl text primarily, alt and title tags for images must be put in.

    Outside of those sorts of things.. the only other way you can really boost your page ranking, is by having sites link to you. The higher the page ranking of the site linking to you, the more it will help you.
    So get on out and market the bejesus out of your slice of the web :)

    hope that helps.

  16. RoseCitySister
    Member
    Posted 3 years ago #

    You should still be at least listed in Google under your site name - but I wouldn't be haunting the search results 8 hours after submitting.

    I've gotten good results by using spanking clean markup (XHTML/CSS), and making sure there's nothing holding back the bots - Google Webmaster Tools, like the poster above recommends. I try to make everything accessible - it's not only the right thing to do, accessible sites tend to be search-engine friendly sites!

    I use All-in-One-SEO - I don't use SEO Title Tag since it would be redundant. AIO SEO also prevents duplicate content. I know that the description tag's value isn't as high as it was in the past but it still has some effect. Both of these should be unique to each page. The meta keywords tag is useless now, I wouldn't bother, but it can't hurt.

    AS far as incoming links, they can vary in value. Link farms will hurt you. Use what I call natural links - a natural link is when someone references your site in an article or blog post and links to it.

    Page rank alone won't guarantee your SE results - content really is king. And if you have good content that is easy for the SE's to crawl, then people will link to you and page rank will follow.

    Lastly - is your business or site local? If so, then you want to use your city and state (or city/county, whatever) in your title and description. Especially if you're aiming for a common phrase. For example, for the words "web design" my old web design site was on page 27 or something like that. For the words "Portland Oregon Web Design" it was #1 or #2. However, and this proves my prior point about content - when I retired and stopped updating the site, my position in Google for those keywords plunged within a couple of months.

    Have fun!

  17. morerockin
    Member
    Posted 3 years ago #

    Slylake, I just created a robot.txt file that says this verbatim:

    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /wp-admin
    Disallow: /wp-includes
    Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
    Disallow: /wp-content/cache
    Disallow: /wp-content/themes
    Disallow: /trackback
    Disallow: /cgi-bin
    Disallow: /search
    Disallow: /feed
    Disallow: /rss
    Disallow: /comments/feed
    Disallow: /feed/$
    Disallow: /*/feed/$
    Disallow: /*/feed/rss/$
    Disallow: /*/trackback/$

    Is that ok? I want a crawler to crawl everything on my site I guess as I don't have anything on there that I wouldn't want shared.

    As far as the permalinks goes, I am going to get on it right now. I am not sure how it works but every newb must sink or swim!

  18. morerockin
    Member
    Posted 3 years ago #

    I changed my permalinks to Day and name but once I visited site and clicked on a post it brought the 404 screen or something similar. Is there a way to retroactively change all the rest of the posts to permalink with date and time?

  19. morerockin
    Member
    Posted 3 years ago #

    Thanks for the tips RoseCitySister!

  20. morerockin
    Member
    Posted 3 years ago #

    I still am not having ANY luck.

    I have change to Permalinks.
    I have setup Webmaster account with Google which it is still telling me:

    No pages from your site are currently included in Google's index. Indexing can take time. You may find it helpful to review our information for webmasters and webmaster guidelines.

    You have recently submitted one or more Sitemaps for this site. Processing Sitemaps may take some time. Check again later to see if pages from your Sitemaps are included in Google's index.

    I have All-in-one SEO activated as well as SEO Title Tag.

    My robots.txt file has this in the file:
    User-agent: *
    Disallow:

    Google has detected my sitemap.

    I still do not have one single hit on Yahoo, Ask.com, or Google.

    What am I doing wrong?

  21. iridiax
    Member
    Posted 3 years ago #

    Who is your web host? Contact them to ensure that they are not blocking bots. If you are using anything to block bad bots yourself, I'd recommend disabling it.

    Also, there is a code error that needs fixing. Change this:

    <meta name="verify-v1" content="QwiJgrXKNBYYQYzALVyXbCzMCLLQf4ysZf/iNIzKY6E=" >

    To this:

    <meta name="verify-v1" content="QwiJgrXKNBYYQYzALVyXbCzMCLLQf4ysZf/iNIzKY6E=" />

    Make sure that you keep checking Webmaster Tools for any messages or reported errors.

  22. MarkRH
    Member
    Posted 3 years ago #

    Could always create a Google Reader account or add it to your existing Google Account and subscribe to your own blog's feed.

    Also, make sure to have something like http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ in your Update Services option in the Writing Settings to notify various places when you make a post.

    Actually, Google pulls up 10 entries for your site now, http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aeyesonthelies.com&btnG=Search

    So, it has been there.

  23. reflexionstudios
    Member
    Posted 3 years ago #

    Here's what you're doing wrong: you're not waiting long enough. Just be patient. Sheesh.

    Build your site to be SEO friendly, as others before me have stated, using proper tags and attributes. Use meta keywords, <h1> tags, have incoming links, promote your site, include a robot/crawler file, validate your site, etc etc etc.

  24. RoseCitySister
    Member
    Posted 3 years ago #

    morerockin, reflexion studio is right - slow down!

    Enthusiasm is great - I wish I was feeling what you're feeling right now, but I've been doing sites for years and am very jaded!

    Time is on your side (great song) and if you're applying the tips and techniques that members have described to you, and adding good, rich content on a frequent basis, you are going to get there! Just not in a couple of minutes, lol

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