Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [32]
Chapter Contents
Monday: Find your Search Engine–Friendliness
Tuesday: Use Search Engine Tools to Check Your Website
Wednesday: Use Firefox’s Free Tools
Thursday: Follow the W3C Accessibility Checklists
Friday: Find Human-Friendliness
Monday: Find Your Search Engine–Friendliness
As covered in previous chapters, search engines make a copy of your website that resides in their servers. Today’s activities represent the initial exploration into the technical world of the search engines and how they see your existing website. Primarily, this section will teach you how to see whether the search engines have found your website or whether they have downloaded the pages.
Check the Number of Pages Indexed
The fastest way to check on the number of pages indexed by a search engine is to do a simple search. By typing the command site:yourdomain.com in the search box of the major search engines, the search engine will show a list of the pages indexed and cataloged in the database.
Of course, for this check to be meaningful, you need to have an idea of the number of pages in your website. If you have a larger website or one that has multiple publishers or has grown over the years, knowing the number of actual pages can be a tricky prospect. What you are looking for in this query is for the number of pages indexed by the search engines to be close to the number of pages in your website. One sign that there is trouble right away is if only two or three pages appear in the list. Sometimes, for websites that are built with Flash, you will see a few pages, the Flash movie file, and that’s about it. Obviously, the search engine has not been able to get beyond the main page of Flash programming.
Having significantly fewer pages appear than you expect also happens with some programming issues that cause the URLs to be too long or difficult for the search engines to follow. This is happening more and more infrequently and tends to be the result of a programming resource more than it is the fault of the search engine. If this is identified as a problem for you, Chapters 13 through 15 will explore more technical reasons you may be having problems and how to fix them. If you are designing a new site, then those same chapters will help you avoid big problems with the search engines by knowing specifically what to avoid and why. By educating yourself to be able to respond competently to programming and development questions before the process, you will avoid a lot of frustration after the site launches.
If no pages appear in the list, that means the search engine has not “seen” or downloaded your website. This could be happening for many reasons. The primary reason is that there may be no links to your website from any other websites. Search engines use links from web pages to find new pages and new websites on the Web. If no one is linking to your site, then the search engines may not have found it.
A secondary reason for your site not to show in the search engines is likely a technical issue that prevents the search engine from properly accessing the pages of your website. Chapters 13 and 14 address typical technical traps that keep sites from performing well.
Perform a Snippet Check
Just as important as checking to see whether the search engines have downloaded a copy of your website is making sure it is the correct copy. Therefore, you should check the snippet of information that shows up in the search engine results page for your website (see Figure 4-1).
Figure 4-1: Bing: the search engine results “snippet”
The snippet is a critical piece of information about the page and about your company. It is the first marketing message a searcher will see about your company. It must be compelling, congruent, and clear about the content that the searcher