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12 Comments

Struggling with SEO ..

Hi hackers,
I'm trying to optimize my SEO but till now, without success.
I've focused the attention of my meta titles and descriptions on 'app discover', 'how to find new apps', 'discover new android apps', and so on and so forth.
But my website (appsponsor.it) just doesn't show up in search results (you can also find unrelated stuff, but about my website, neither its shadow).
NOTE: I've been SEOing only for some days, so changes are recent, but they are not so different from the previous one though.
Anyone that can suggest pratical and effective guidelines?

Edit:
After almost one year, I can say that domains matter... .com is just... .com
With .it domain I had issues both in google ranking but also with facebook crawlers.

Check out my new startup, might be interesting for developers: https://k-stash.com

on September 25, 2019
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    Another reason could be the fact that you have an .it domain, this is the top-level domain(TLD) for Italy, and not many sites rank for international keywords using a country TLD, there may be some cases, but +95% won't rank.

    Also, what pages are you trying to rank? Because if you're trying to rank your main page, this is going to be a problem as you have no relevant content on there.

    In my opinion the best way to go about this is to create a blog and target long tail keywords(if you don't know what they are you can check out this short explanation: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/definition-long-tail-keyword-100-words-sr).

    For example the keyword: "app discover" have 10-100 searches per month according to Google Keywords Tool, and a lot of competition as you can see just by a google search: you're competing against google, discover.com and apple, in my option that isn't work for 100 searches per month.

    According to this tool: https://www.keywordrevealer.com/tools/keywordresearch it has a competition of 47%, which is a lot, for reference there are keywords under 40% competition that have 10.000 or more searches per month.

    The most important part of the SEO is keyword research, it's like the foundation to your house, if it's bad the house will fall. So try to create a blog and use LST(long tail keywords) as your targeted keywords for the articles you're writing, this way you will start getting some traffic slowly, but don't expect overnight success with your SEO, because it may take months until you see some results, this again depends on what keywords you can find, if you find some hidden gems you may be able to rank them in a few weeks, less if your domain have some authority.

    PS: Another thing you can try to do is to use some other site authority to rank for keywords, for example you could create youtube videos and then link back to your website, this way you will rank and also get a quality backlink.

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      .co is a country .TLD for Colombia, the same .io and .ai. You see mostly .com sites because older websites have .com TLD, websites that can afford it buy the .com TLD and there are a lot more .com websites than other domain TLDs.

      It's true that country-specific domains are a bit of a disadvantage but they are hardly the determining factor.

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        There is also .me that is the TLD for Montenegro, but some of them seem to be accepted as an international TLD now, while others aren't(I am not 100% sure about this).
        But I've never seen a .it domain ranked in my searches on google and as a technical founder I search a lot about IT related stuff.

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          You are right, but how many international website with a .it you know? I know only scoop.it. I agree with you that it isn't optimal but there are something like 100 ranking factors and I doubt that the it is the problem here.

          He basically optimized the on-page seo and nothing else. No backlinks, no content marketing, competitve keywords to rank for and so on.

  2. 2

    Hey, you're not showing up for these keywords because Google thinks that your page is not relevant to them. You need to create more relevant content first, not optimize meta tags.

    Check top-performing pages for your wanted queries and try to reverse engineer it. Are they blog posts? Maybe "top" or "best" lists? Perhaps app directories like yours but with some additional content twist? Either way, Google thinks that they are relevant, so unless you're a SEO guru, you should try to replicate the content structure but make it better, more engaging and trustworthy than your competitors (for that keyword).

    Also, always check whenever it's worth at all to chase some keywords. Some might be too competitive, while others might not have enough search volume to be worth the struggle.

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      thank you, that's a starting point!
      I'll dig into my content!

  3. 1

    first of all, thank you all guys.
    appsonsor.it has been my really first experience on the web, seo first of all.
    As a programmer I thought it would be awesome creating a website, so I did it and quite well too.
    But soon I understood that I couldn't manage all the aspects of it.

    So I made some choices, also based on some of your suggestions:

    • retargeted the website to a more general, wider audience: just new stuff, including apps (in this way, since I have a wider spectrum of topics, it will be even more easier creating content)
      -renamed the domain: honestly I didn't like it so much and with the retargeting I decided to go with justnewstuff.com
    • wordpress based: I ve discovered the powerfulness of its plugins, now I have just to focus on content
    • will do my best to create creative and good quality content, keep my self updated on google search algorithm changes and how it works
    • learned to study and analyze things before proceeding

    thank you all again.

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    It would be helpful to know how long your site has been around. That's a significant aspect of SEO. It takes time.

    Have you activated Google Search Console for your site and made sure there are no crawl issues? It should be the first thing you do, pretty much. Here you can also ask Google to re-crawl pages as you update them or crawl new ones as you add them. (Google crawls new sites much less frequently than more established ones.)

    Your site has definitely been indexed by Google, though:
    https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aappsponsor.it&oq=site%3Aappsponsor.it

    This above, btw, is a nifty little trick if you want to see what all your site pages look like in search results on Google. Just google "site:yourdomain.com".

    As someone else said here, relevant, quality inbound links help, for sure. Links are less important than they used to be but they are a strong signal to Google that your site matters.

    Another increasingly important ranking factor is performance. Google uses a "mobile first" approach these days. You have some things you may want to fix there:
    https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.appsponsor.it%2F&tab=mobile

    Your pages also don't seem to be using semantic HTML very much. I looked at some pages and there's not even an H1 in there. This is also a factor and helps search engines properly understand your site's content.

    Also, don't go too crazy with your page titles and meta descriptions and stuff them to the brim with keywords. People have abused that for years, so don't think that Google's increasingly sophisticated algorithms won't detect it. Keywords matter, but you also want to think about how people react when they see your titles and meta descriptions in Google search results. Do they invite a click? At that point it's an advertisement.

    And don't forget that ultimately you need to have great content. :) It is, at least indirectly, the biggest ranking factor of all. Great content, and HTML formatted to make it easy to be indexed and understood by search engines.

    Side notes unrelated to SEO:

    You have some weird formatting in some of your meta tags. For example, look at your Open Graph description (og:description) where the content copy contains extra spaces here and there. You may want to fix that.

    Also, why are you lowercasing "android"? And, "app discover" should be "app discovery", I assume?

    In general, don't underestimate the value of good copy and grammar even if it (AFAIK) isn't a direct ranking signal in Google. It will improve your UX. (Sorry, I'm an old copywriter. I can't help myself. :) ).

    Anyway, good luck with your site, Mauro! :)

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    Agree with the others, your content is too thin to make it to the top of the SERPs. Consider how many competitors there are for those keywords and how long they have had to establish their positions.

    If you want to draw people to your page, I recommend engaging on social. Build a presence and get to know your target audience. Look at some of Seth Godin's advice for finding and building your tribe. Continue to work on your content, of course, but keep in mind that SEO is a long game.

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      yes, I have it on most of my pages and it is correctly parsed by google

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    If I understood it right, you have optimized on page SEO and you expect that's enough to rank. If that's the case, it doesn't work like that. Not even close.

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