In my last post, I promised to follow up with a simple plan for launching an SEO effort on your site. As a quick refresher, these three components are the basis of any SEO plan. If you are looking for a place to start, your best bet is to follow this plan first before moving on to any of the more advanced SEO tactics, such as social media, etc.
Step 1: make sure that your site is easy for search engines to find and process.
Step 2: perform keyword research and incorporate those words into your web pages.
Step 3: find quality websites that are similar in topic to your own and request that these sites link to you.
Today, we’ll focus on step 1: making sure the search engines can find your site. Can you imagine spending hours, even days, making sure that your site has been upgraded with all of the latest SEO fixes, only to find that Google does not even know about it? Believe it or not, many people’s hard work is never rewarded, as their sites are simply unknown to Google.
Luckily, today it is easier than ever to alert the search engines to your site’s presence. In this post, I will focus only on Google, but Yahoo and MSN have similar tools if you want to confirm that your site is indexed (included).
Confirm that your site is indexed:
- Go to www.google.com.
- In the search box, type the exact URL of your site (ex: www.ebay.com).
- Your site should appear as the #1 result. If it does not, your site is not indexed.
Confirm that all of the pages in your site are indexed:- Go to www.google.com.
- In the search box, type this: site:yoursite.com (replace “yoursite” with the actual URL of your site (ex: site:ebay.com).
- On the right hand side of the page, Google will list all pages returned as “results”. If you know that your site has 50+ pages and Google lists 9 results, then your pages are not all included.
Why doesn’t Google know about my site?New site - if your site has been up for less than six months, it may be stuck in the Google sandbox, a holding tank for new websites. The Google sandbox, launched in March 2004, is an algorithmic filter that places new sites under quarantine until they are deemed clean (non-spam). The average time for sites to remain in the sandbox is three months, although it may take up to six months for your site to be released, particularly if you use very competitive keywords.
Robots.txt - many websites include a feature called a robots.txt file. The robots.txt file functions to direct the search engines to parts of your site that should or should not be crawled. Think of it as a roadmap for the engines to follow when they visit your site. For example, the robots.txt file may tell the search engine: “Welcome to my site! Please visit every page except for the ones called www.mysite.com/private.”. In this case, all of your pages will appear in Google, except for the ones that appear under the “private” directory. If you have a robots.txt file that instructs the search engines not to visit your site, it will never be indexed.
To check to see if you have a robots.txt file, go to
Botseer.com and click on “robots.txt”. Enter the name of your site, without the http:// or the www. (ex: amazon.com). If you get a message that says, “No robots.txt files found in our database matching the query amazon.com” you do not have a robots.txt file.
If you do get a robots.txt file, you will need to understand the code to make sure that the Googlebot is allowed to visit your site. Google provides a nice
tutorial on this subject.
What do I do if my site is not indexed?Submit your URL to Google: it doesn’t get any easier than this. Simply go to the
Google Add URL Page and type in the full URL of your site (ex: http://www.google.com).
Add a Google sitemap: if your site was indexed in Google, but some of the pages were missing, you need to add a Google sitemap. This will alert Google to all of the pages on your site. Even if Google did find them all, it’s still good practice to have a Google sitemap in place. Here is a link to to instructions on
adding your Google sitemap. Note: this does take a bit of technical know-how, so if you are not comfortable uploading content to your website, ask for some help.
Wait: if your site is brand new, you may simply have to wait for a few weeks until Google releases your site from the Google Sandbox. In many cases, submitting your URL to Google along with a sitemap will expedite the process greatly.
Years of SEO consulting for small businesses and large companies has taught me that most SEO efforts fail not because of a lack of technical know-how, but because of a lack of planning. Like many large projects, successful SEO efforts rely on a variety of tactics which are planned and implemented in an organized and thoughtful manner. In other words, if you are serious about gaining visibility in the search engines, you can’t just run out and grab a few links and change a few title tags on your site. However, if you are committed to integrating SEO strategies on your site, these next few posts will serve as the foundation for an exciting and rewarding undertaking!
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Cool info!