Mark Warrick - Search Engine Optimization Specialist
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one part of an overal website marketing strategy which encompasses such things as meta tag optimization, proper keyword selection, website structure analysis, and domain name research.
The goal of search engine optimization is to improve the chances of your website being found through "naturual" aka "organic" search results for targeted keywords and phrases and ultimately, to improve the volume of quality traffic from your target audience to your website.
Optimizing a Website for Search Engine Inclusion
The process of optimizing a website for search engine inclusion ensures that the major search engines know what content on your website needs to be indexed. Once a site is ready to be submitted to the search engines, or re-indexed, I generate an XML sitemap and submit it to the major search engines. I can then monitor the search engines index stats as the crawlers begin to discover the content of your website and analyze the results. Obviously, the goal is 100% saturation of all the content your website.
My Hits Have Gone Through the Roof! That's Good Right?
A spike in traffic levels might be a good thing, then again it might not. Remember that the goal is to bring quality traffic to the website and ultimately, to turn them into customers. You definitely want the major search engines coming in and taking a look, but at the same time you need to be blocking the "bad bots" from taxing your website with a bunch of traffic that will do you no good. Read about Controlling Web Crawlers.
Common Reasons Why the Spiders (Bots, Crawers, etc) Didn't Index Your Site or Why They Dropped You
- You submitted the website to the engines but you haven't waited long enough for them to come around. Be patient. It can take months before your website is found and even longer for deep (complete) indexing.
- They already know about your website; your content is stale. Are you wondering why the engines have cached copies of your two-year old website yet they won't come take a look at your new content? A few carefully placed meta tags, a fresh sitemap and notifications to the right engines can solve that problem.
- 404 errors (missing pages). At some time or another, your web site or portions of it were inaccessible. If you made no changes to the website and you're sure all your pages are still there, consider switching to a more reliable web hosting company.
- The engines got lost at the front door! If you don't give the engines a map to your website, they will stop at the first page.
- Nobody links to you! Some engines (such as Google) find you by finding your link on other websites. If nobody has linked to you yet, you'll have a real hard time getting into some engines. Consider the paid inclusion programs of such providers as Yahoo.
- Improper website design can make it impossible for engines to index your website. Flash apps, images, and most JavaScript elements cannot be indexed. If your website has no basic HTML links within and no text backing up all the flashy look and feel items, it simply will not be indexed.
- Let me in! So you thought it would be a good idea to "protect" the content of your website with a login? Wrong. Much like the humans who created them, engines cannot enter a website that is password protected. And unlike humans, the robots aren't going to ask for your permission, fill out new user forms, etc.
- You get what you pay for. Many search engines will not index websites that are hosted with free services like Geocities, Tripod, AOL Homepages, etc.
- But I didn't even know him! (Bad IP Neighborhood) If your domain name shares the same IP address with many others on the same server, and if one of those other website masters does something wrong that got them banned from the engines, then there's a good chance that your website will be banned as well. NOTE: Some say that this does not apply according to Google, but why risk it?
- Stop bugging us! Did you know that repeatedly re-submitting your website to the engines can cause it to be banned?
- Oh those pesky symbols! Some engines will not index any page of a website which contains symbols like a question mark or ampersand in the URL.
- Too big! Most engines have a limit to how much content of each page they are willing to read before moving onto the next page.
- Too far away! If the category structure of your website is complex with numerous sub directories, chances are, the engines will not venture past the first few levels of content to find what is deep within your website.
- SPAM, Stop Words, and other tricks that lesser experienced SEO people use can cause your pages to be excluded from the engines. Do not believe any person who tells you that they can guarantee your website will be at the top of any search engine, unless of course, you're paying for ads at the to of the search engine.
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