Learn/Get-Ready-for-Search-Engines
Revision as of 21:51, 15 April 2011 by KristinaWeis (talk | contribs)
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The internet is growing at an astonishing rate -- both in terms of the number of websites, and the number of new pages on existing sites. Many websites undergo redesigns, too.
The search engines are eager to discover and index these new and newly-redesigned websites, but there's a caveat: sometimes new pages are hot news, and sometimes they're still under construction or in transition. These "not quite done yet" sites wouldn't be helpful in search results, so search engines want to avoid including them.
What we're going to show you today is a list of mistakes you can easily make on your website that can indicate to search engines that your site isn't ready. We'll show you how to avoid or fix these problems so you don't hurt your rankings across the board.
#1 Slow load time for your web pages.
- Roughly a year ago, Matt Cutts from Google announced that page load times (or site speed) were now one of the factors affecting ranking.
- Luckily there's a great Firefox plug-in called YSlow that can help you identify and fix problems with your page load times. For more tools and ways to improve your page's load time, read 6 Easy Ways to Improve Your Site Speed.
#2 Sitemap problems:
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| —March 2011 interview with Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz and Duane Forrestor from Bing | ||
- Don't include pages in your sitemap that:
- If there's a lot of these, it makes it appear that your sitemap is out of date and perhaps not trustworthy. Use a tool like Xenu Link Sleuth to crawl your site and generate your sitemap XML file for you.
#3 Broken links on your site.
- Again, use Xenu Link sleuth to crawl your website like the bots do, and it'll report any broken internal links. And remember, you might not even see some of your 404's--for instance, if a javascript include file (huh?) is no longer used and no longer exists, your page might run fine, BUT the crawler will try to fetch that file and get a 404. Same is true for images--a missing image file will generate a 404. Xenu will catch these.
#4 Broken pages, i.e. pages that return an HTTP 500 error.
- It's the website equivalent to a Windows application crashing, and it's definitely a bad experience for a human visitor. A 500 error also sends a negative signal to the search engines.
#5 Not canonicalizing your subdomains.
- Make sure that your domain can be accessed both with and without a leading "www.". I've seen a number of sites lately that return nothing at all for non-www version. Users should be able to type your domain name with or without the www, and be served the exact same content. Additionally, you should choose which of those subdomains (i.e. with or without the www) is your preferred version, and 301 redirect the other. For more information, read Multiple Subdomains: Classic SEO Mistake.
#6 The anti-social website:
- In today's world, the search engines look to social signals as part of their ranking algorithms. This means getting your site shared on Facebook and tweeted about in Twitter. If no one at all is mentioning you in either of those places, it looks like your site is no longer relevant.
#7 The Site Coma:
- Has anything changed on your website in the past 3 months? 6 months? The past year? The search engines are well aware of whether or not you've got new pages or updated content. Just watch your crawl rates in Google Webmaster Tools if you don't stir things up for a while!
- A simple solution to this problem and #6 is to add a blog to your site, and then auto-publish snippets from your blog onto your company Facebook page using the Facebook app RSS Graffiti (link?). And for blog content, it's not even necessary for YOU to have news, new products, or new services to talk about--just blog about industry-related news items you discover, writing a couple of sentences of synopsis and linking out to articles covering the news in more depth.
#8 Not paying attention:
- Google and Bing have great webmaster tools available for helping you understand what they're seeing in your website in terms of links and content issues. If you haven't registered your site and your sitemaps with them, it won't necessarily HURT your rankings. But there's some great information there that will help you improve your site and your rankings, and being registered there is certainly an indicator that your site is still in business. And I've solved many problems for clients and gotten them back in the search results very quickly simply by resubmitting their sitemaps to Google and Bing after fixing the problems.
Other references: