New Websites and SEO. How is it going for you?
I'll start: BAD!
I don't know what's up with Google, but my 5-month-old website hasn't been able to get indexed (with the exception of the home page). All the content is in the blog, so I was counting on that to get visitors, but Google has basically never crawled the website forever.
From a technical perspective, it's all healthy and fine. Content is OK, not great, but no reason to not even get a visit by GoogleBot.
If this is the new reality of SEO, I find it very hard for small businesses to count on SEO in the beginning. Of course, it was always hard, but now it feels like an impossible task.
How is it going for you?
You may be missing a sitemap and robot Need help?
@kdhrubo Thanks for the reply! Technically speaking, I think the. website is on point, i.e. 100 score on lighthouse, sitemap submitted, no indexing issues detected.
I think the main issue is that Googlebot isn't visiting the site at all (as I can see from the requests tab in Google Search Console) which makes me think Google doesn't even know if my website's stuff is indexable or not 😅
I have the feeling the only way is to have backlinks, but as a non-marketer it's a uphill battle 😬😬😬
Please check this one if it helps you
https://kinsta.com/ebooks/wordpress/how-to-improve-seo
I am also a newbee to SEO. My rough road ahead for sure.
Is your blog in the same domain as your website? e.g., website.com/blog, or does it have its own domain?
@jolvera Yep same domain :) here it is https://makerkit.dev/blog
There are a few things to make sure of, want to drop a link here to your site ?
You've done the google search console submit?
Have you set the robot.txt right? you aren't turning away the bot?
https://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt
https://www.contentkingapp.com/academy/robotstxt/
There is a tester: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/robots-testing-tool
Are you adding content to the site regularly, new pages or content? How many pages do you have on it?
Have you tried a resubmit of the site map? Also be careful of this, if you submit it too much you could be getting pushed back down the queue.
Have you checked out this,
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/webmaster-guidelines?visitid=637880332339675800-2815365121&rd=1#helpfind
They have a bunch of resources out there for getting into the index.
But you can get the attention of the google bot organically.
Adding a few links out there back to pages on the blog will help. but you have to do it in the right way not the spammy way.
Put a tweet out there with a link to the home page, make sure your twitter profile is public.
@jamesmkenny thanks for the reply! The website is https://makerkit.dev.
In terms of on-page SEO, I think it's solid, but off-page I've done little to nothing. I've usually been able to push websites very high by focusing on content, but here it's not working well.
There are about 54 pages (most of them with content, Docs + Website). Sitemap and robots.txt healthy and not blocking. Lighthouse score is 100.
I published a few blog posts, then I got discouraged as Googlebot simply isn't visiting the website (which means, any on-page SEO optimization would be irrelevant).
Googlebot has come back in the past few days (after 2 months since the last time) and indexed two pages - so maybe the tide is turning? 🤔
@giancarlo That's great that it has started to see it, I did a quick check site:makerkit.dev and you have a few pages there in the index now.
It can be very slow sometimes, it's not really about Lighthouse though, with the google bot, it's about the site being interesting to it and getting it's attention. It's not even about good or bad SEO at this stage.
What I'd do is try and start building some back links to get the attention, you have a twitter account for makerkit, start scheduling some tweets with links to the blog posts, spread them out over a few weeks and different times.
Sharing the link here in the comment helps too btw ;)
Sites like dev.to might be good too, take some of the posts you have and write a copy on dev to, set the canonical link to go back to makerkit.dev https://dev.to/michaelburrows/comment/125j0
Something like Get paid by Stripe, might be a good one to do that with.
Setting a canonical link is great, it means you can reuse content and get it credited back to the original source.
Hackernews is another one, post some of the posts as Show HN, you might not get a lot of traffic or upvotes, but by having the links out there the bot can find you easier.
When the bot encounters a link, it follows it. So by sharing it to places that are indexed. you increase your chances of the bot finding it and then moving through the site.
Make sure your site has an RSS Feed, and add that feed into the site map and footer on the page, also make sure your site map is in the footer too.
The bot follows one of those links you make, it will read the page and follow the links on the page, so if you have the site map / RSS feed as links on the page the bot will follow them.
(The first time, I posted this reply it disappeared on me, so if this is duplicated apologies, I'll check it)
@jamesmkenny Thanks for the detailed answer!
I guess I will start doing more outside of the page from now on (a bit terrifying, but oh well nothing to lose 🤣)
I believe one of my mistakes was publishing the website before having content on it; Google crawled it, was like "naaah" and stopped visiting for months. 6 months later it started coming back 🤔
@jamesmkenny Update on this, I think after the latest Google Core Update. Now Google indexes them in 5 minutes 😅😅😅
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