Basic SEO Troubleshooting

There are a number of good SEO checklists you can use when you start to optimize your web site for the search engines. They’ll help you make sure you don’t miss anything as you climb to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs). But what do you do if you’ve done everything you can think of and your site doesn’t seem to be going anywhere?

Every SEO seems to confront this frustrating situation sooner or later. Fortunately, there are forums devoted to SEO. Many heads with lots of experience, often with very different kinds of sites, can come up with things to check that one person beating his or her head against a bunch of pixels might not have considered. Developers call the practice of trying to figure out why a particular program isn’t working the way it should “troubleshooting.” This article will cover some of the things you’ll want to consider when troubleshooting your web site’s SEO.
It was inspired by a thread in our own SEO Chat forums. The original poster mentioned that he maintained a site that had less than half of its pages listed in the main index of Google. He made some major changes to its internal linking structure to fix some mistakes he’d made earlier; Google also isn’t listing his internal links correctly now. He’s looking for some kind of checklist so he doesn’t feel like he’s just stabbing in the dark.
The first check he can perform, of course, is to make sure that his site is set up in accordance with Google’s own guidelines. The search engine just recently updated these guidelines to be clearer and include more information. If you scroll down to “Quality guidelines – specific guidelines,” you’ll see that many of the bulleted points now contain hyperlinks that take you to more information about specific issues, such as hidden text. Take your time with these to make sure you fully understand the guidelines.

Once you’ve done that, a lot of the things you need to check fall under proper site maintenance and making sure that Google can see everything you want them to see. This won't solve all your problems, you understand, but enough items can be accounted for in this way that it’s worth going down the list.