Why doesn't my site appear on google?

Hey, I built a website for my friend www.bespokegardenroomsuk.co.uk and the site works fine, but it doesn’t appear in the first page of google (not even the first 10) when i type in ‘bespoke garden rooms uk’. surely it would be the first? i submitted the url to them, I submitted the sitemaps too, i just don’t know what else to do… please help!

There are two things I have noticed. Others may have further suggestions. The domain seems to be only about 3 weeks old. It can take several weeks for Google to get off its butt and index a new website. Secondly, there are not a lot of words on the home page for Google to index.

The following links might help:

https://yandex.com/support/webmaster/yandex-indexing/webmaster-advice.xml

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The site is indexed with Google, but it’s a bit optimistic to expect page 1 so soon without on-page SEO to begin with.
There are a few issues. No meta descriptions, no alt text in your images, this is especially important for your logo, being an image to represent text. Your use of h1 tags should be re-thought. Also the site is not responsive which will affect mobile SERPs.

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Welcome to the forums, @ryonine.

Firstly, the site has been indexed. You can confirm this by going to Google and entering site:bespokegardenroomsuk.co.uk as the search term. (Note: one of the results which comes up is an incomplete page, which you might want to fix ASAP.)

First thing to understand is how search works. Google attempts to return results which most closely match the search term. So it will be looking for ‘bespoke garden rooms uk’ in the page content.

There are several issues with your page in this respect. You have multiple <h1> elements, which is considered bad practice; use headings in an hierarchical manner. But you do not have a heading with the name of the site. That appears as an image with no alt (alternative) text. Alt text is very important, primarily for visitors who are unable to see the images for some reason - either because they have a visual impairment, or simply because the image hasn’t loaded for some reason. But alt text is also important to search engines. They cannot “read” text in an image, or tell what images portray, so rely on alt text to help them make sense of the page.

See http://webaim.org/techniques/alttext/ for advice on writing good alt text. This Google video may also help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NbuDpB_BTc

So my advice would be to start by sorting out your headings, and the alt text for your images. I would also recommend the Google starter guide @Gandalf linked to above. (Google will give you information on how to do things the right way; the problem with a lot of SEO advice found online is that it’s dodgy, “quick fix” stuff which will cause you problems further down the line.)

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Thank you for the quick responses guys, I’ve just popped some alt text on the logos, i’ll add them to all the images now.

I’ll look at the links and make my way through. appreciate it!

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One other thing @ryonine. It would be a good idea to run your site through the HTML Validator https://validator.w3.org/nu/ to check for HTML errors, and fix any problems found.

I already did - and there weren’t any.

(Well done, @ryonine. )

(Edit: To be clear, I ran it through the one @SamA74 linked to below.)

That’s the validator for html5. The site is XHTML 1.0 Transitional.
Use this one for pre html5 pages

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Doh!

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