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Why am I not listed in the search engines?

There are many reasons why your online shop / website is not listed in the search engines, this article aims to take you through the most popular reasons and offers advice on how to get listed in the search engines.

First things first, are you even listed?

Your website might already be listed in the search engines, so the first thing to do is actually check for this. You can do this by going to Google (usually the first search engine to index your site) and searching for your websites domain name, so for example “stylusonline.co.uk”. If this returns no results then you’re not listed, however in most cases it should return one or two results which you can then check to verify that your site is in fact listed.

The rest of this article will apply to you if you’re listed but not ranking very well or if your site isn’t listed at all.


You haven’t given it enough time

Getting listed in the major search engines takes time; this can be anything from 4 to 6 weeks up to several months.

Search engines like Google can put your site in something they call the sandbox, this is an area where they monitor your site as its new to ensure that it’s a real site and that it is here to stay, its only after several weeks that they release your site from this sandbox and into the ranked results.

Building up any business takes months and in most cases years. The internet is no different and if you expect to setup an ecommerce website and within a few months retire on millions of pounds then you can forget it. The days of “build it and they will come” are well and truly over.


Your site isn’t popular enough

All the major search engines rank their results based on popularity. The basis for this is inbound links, the more sites on the internet that link to your website, the higher yours will appear in the results. Therefore if there are no other sites on the internet that are linking to your site then you will not achieve very good rankings.

The solution to this is to get as many relevant sites as possible to link to yours, this is known as link building and a good way of finding such sites is to perform competitor analysis.


Your site doesn’t have much content

If there is very little content on your website in the way of text then you will not get a very high rank. All the search engines go off the amount of textual content on your website, the more the better. So if your entire site consists of a few pages with a few sentences of text then you can forget getting high rankings. On the internet content is king when it comes to achieving good ranking.


In Summary

There is no secret to getting good search engine rankings; there are just three easy steps…
  1. Ensure your website has plenty of content
  2. Get as many relevant inbound links as possible
  3. Give it plenty of time
tracker error: stylusonline.co.uk