You have a fabulous looking website and everything seems to be in place. You are offering fantastic services or products that you are sure that Internet users will immediately snatch up. You submitted your website to the Internet search engines and are excited to see what happens. However, you are now scratching your head wondering why your website can’t be seen.
When you submit a website to a search engine, it will not automatically appear. The search engine needs time to recognize that your website even exists. One of the reasons behind the lag is that the search engines use what’s called a crawler that scans the content of your website. Once your website is submitted to a search engine, it can take days or weeks for the crawler to visit your website and perform its scan.
A downside to these crawlers is that they sometimes have issues seeing the website. Website owners and designers sometimes focus more on the look of the website over the content. Eye pleasing flash and JavaScript can sometimes block the crawler or bot from being able to recognize the content of your website.
You also might not be able to see your website listed in the search engine because it is not listed within the first few pages. Each internet search engine has thousands, if not millions of websites relating to certain subject matters. If your website it about candles and you type in the keyword “candle,” the search engine is going to return page after page of website results.
Search engines tend to trust older websites over newer websites. They do this, because websites are built and then forgot about by their owners at times. The longer the website has been around, the higher up the website it going to be in the search engine listings.
Your website may also be unseen because of content issues (or lack of content). The content on your website has to be highly related to keywords that are being searched for. Going back to the candle website example; you are selling scented candles which are based on the smells of nature. If an internet user is searching for “nature scented candles”; the search engine is going to bring up websites which contain those keywords in the content first. If the words “nature”, “scented” and “candles” are not listed on your website or listed without the correct keyword density, your website is not going to show high up in the search engine results.
When a website is completed, one of the things that seems to fall under the table, is the number of good incoming and outgoing links. As mentioned, internet search engines value websites which are trusted. Another way for the search engines to think that a website is trusted, is if they are linked to other websites which have existed a long time, have good content and is ranked high in the search engines.
Simply placing a link to another high ranked website on one of your pages is not going to do the trick however. You need not only provide a link to other trusted websites, but those websites need to provide links to your site (reciprocal link). You also need to be very careful which websites you link to. Linking to websites which have low page ranks in the search engines can actually do more harm than good.
While these are just a few of the different reasons why your website is not appearing in the search engines that you submitted your site to, it is a good starting point to research the issue.