When it comes to plastic surgery advertising on the Internet, the search engines are essential to the success of your website. Many, if not most, of your patients will likely find you through the search engines as they conduct research on plastic surgery and plastic surgeons. But if your website’s not showing up in the search engines, you’re losing a lot of potential visitors and patients. The following are common reasons why a website may not appear in the search engines:
- Impatience. After submitting your site to the search engines, you must be patient. It can takes months before the spider actually visits your site, let alone for your site to show up. Many search engines have a tremendous backlog of sites waiting to be indexed and often times you’ll need to submit your site more than once. Keep in mind, however, that submitting too much can be bad, so stick to one submission per week until you’re indexed.
- Submission. Did you submit your website to the search engines? If not, that right there may be the one and only reason why you’re not appearing in the search engines. While some believe that simply designing an attractive website will attract the search engine spiders, this simply isn’t so. There are millions of websites out there and, in order to get noticed, you must submit your site to the search engines, and you may even have to submit it more than once.
- Splash Pages. Splash pages typically aren’t able to be indexed by the search engines so if you’re using one, you may be turning the spiders away. If you’re intent on using a splash page, include TITLE and META tags and provide some text links that lead to your real content.
- Server Downtime. Unfortunately, the search engine spiders don’t announce themselves before coming to your site. It’s always possible that the spider came and your site wasn’t there. Check with your web host to make sure that your site hasn’t been experiencing any downtime of late, particularly right when that spider came to visit.
- Spam. Do you know who your neighbors are? If you’re sharing your web host with companies with a reputation for spamming the search engines, like many adult-oriented sites, your site may be suffering. The search engines often ban the IP address of the hosting company, thus banning your site right along with those spammers. The same is often true for free web hosting companies which have become known for spammers as well. Even if your neighbors are upstanding ones, check your own website as several innocent design techniques might be misconstrued as spam by the search engines.
- Spider Incompatibility. Make sure that the pages you’re submitting to the search engines can actually be read and indexed by them.