If You Make ANY of these Three Mistakes, Your Site will be Invisible!

Sometimes, the best information is the most basic, and takes the least number of words to say. With that in mind, here are three very basic mistakes that people make time after time when trying to attract traffic to their site.

#1 : Your Site (or page) Isn't Even in Google!

It might sound a bit silly, but do take the time to check that your site is actually listed in Google's index.

How? Do a Google search for [ site:http://www.yoursite.com ] and Google will return a list of every page that appears in Google's index.

If there's one missing, you can add it using the Google Webmaster Tools submission service. This also works for individual pages.

#2 : Your Site (or page) Doesn't Rank Well for Real Keywords!

This sounds like more familiar territory; at least it isn't a newbie error like #1, right? You'd be surprised. The keywords that you think are important might not be as important to your visitors. Get them wrong and you might as well not even be in the index at all.

The remedy? We used to tell people to check their Analytics stats. But since Google decided that we shouldn't be able to see the keywords people use, and since we're trying to make sure that we've got all the keywords down pat, that isn't going to help...

Enter AdWords. More specifically the new AdWords Keyword Planner. Just do a search, using your URL rather than a root keyword, for Keyword and Ad Group ideas. Check that the top 10 matches your content - if it doesn't, again, your site will be invisible to people who don't look past the first few pages of results.

#3 : You Have No Sitemap!

This is a bit obscure for some people, and many forget it. A Sitemap is just a list of all the content on your site - all the FLVs, all the pages, images, and so on - arranged in an XML file that can be easily read by a search engine.

There's the key - search engine - not just Google, but Bing, Yahoo, and others all use Sitemaps to figure out what's on your site, and what's interesting on your site.

For the complete lowdown on Sitemaps, Google has a great page all about them, and you should check it out.

So there it is - a short and sweet guide to making your site go from invisible to visible in three easy steps.