Desperate need of SEO help!

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Yes, but what does it mean to build links to your website from other websites in specific regards to www.ads-software.com

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

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: https://eyesonthelies.com/?cat=7

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

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.

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

Good call! I am doing that now. Thanks

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?

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).

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

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.

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!