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Lost teddy bear

NOTE: This week, we're excited about launching a new site for Wayne Scott, a brilliant, compassionate therapist, writer and teacher. I met Wayne when we were both presenters for Ignite Portland in 2012 and it's been a real pleasure to work together to launch his new site.

This week, a client had a question about how to get her site to show up more in Google search results. Most small businesses build a new site and then don't do anything with it and then wonder why they're not getting more results. I created a silly analogy and tweeted it out. Check it out below (read from the bottom up):

An analogy for getting your site to show up in search results

Google needs proof

When your site is brand new, it takes time for the search engines to crawl through the site and index your pages. You can submit your site directly to Google and Bing to help speed this along, but the bottom line is, you have to wait your turn, and the timing varies.

Once your site has been indexed, it's not enough to just show up online, with all the billions of other sites and wait for people to find you. If you want a recommendation, you have to prove yourself in the form of regular, relevant, useful content.

If your site has been around a while and you've been producing good content and have a few other sites that link to you and you're still invisible to Google, then you might want to make sure there's no technical reason your site is hidden. Here are a few things you can check.

Find out how Google sees your site

Open google.com and in the search bar, type in site:yourdomain.com

This will display all the pages on your site that Google knows about. Below you can see a site launched 24 hours ago compared to this site, which is almost three years old.

Wayne Scott Search Results
Wayne is a therapist, teacher and writer who just launched a brand new site.

Google indexed pages for Karvel Digital

Make sure your site is not blocking search engines

In WordPress, there is a setting that blocks search engines from crawling your site. It's common to have this setting checked during development of a new site so that it doesn't get found before it's ready. However, sometimes a developer can forget to uncheck it once the site goes live.

To check this setting, login to your WordPress dashboard and go to Settings > Reading. Scroll down and make sure that ‘Discourage search engines from indexing this site' is UNchecked.

WordPress search engine visibility setting

If everything looks good, it might be time to contact a professional to help troubleshoot your issues.

Doing anything to improve SEO usually involves long term solutions that require consistency to produce results.

If you remember nothing else about SEO just remember this:

[Tweet “If it's good and helpful for your users, it will probably make Google happy too.”]

About the author 

Kronda Adair

Kronda is the CEO of Karvel Digital, a digital marketing agency that helps mission-driven service-based business owners how to use content to sell so they can automate their marketing and scale without burnout. She loves empowering small business owners to not be intimidated by all this tech stuff. She's often covered in cats.

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