Learn/Get-Ready-for-Search-Engines

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Let's face it - creating a website for your business is a lot easier than getting it to rank well in search results. And good rankings are what you need to get more visitors to your site.

To get your site into search results, you need to make sure that search engines can "see" your site, and that they regard it as ready for human visitors. Search engines are eager to discover and index new - and newly expanded or redesigned - websites, but there's a caveat: sometimes new web pages are ready and useful, and sometimes they're still under construction or in transition. Web pages that are "not quite done yet" wouldn't be helpful to people who find them in search results, so search engines want to avoid including them.

Below you'll find a list of mistakes that can indicate to search engines that your site isn't ready, and that are, unfortunately, easy to make. We'll show you how to avoid or fix these problems so you don't hurt you rankings in search results.

#1 Slow load time for your web pages.

Matt Cutts, head of the webspam team at Google, announced in 2010 that page load time - also called site speed - was now one of the factors affecting a site's ranking in Google's search results.

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 site's page load time, read 6 Easy Ways to Improve Your Site Speed.

#2 Sitemap problems:

“	"We have a quality threshold on our sitemaps. When you build a site map for us, we want it to be clean. When you put a URL into our site map, what I don't want to see in there is any URL that's a 404, 302, 301, anything at all. I want the end state URL only."	”
—March 2011 interview with Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz and Duane Forrestor from Bing

Don't include in your sitemap:

Any pages that return a 404 error
A page that immediately redirects to another page via a 301 redirect
Pages that search engines can find when they crawl your site, but that aren't included in your sitemap

If a search engine sees many pages with the characteristics listed above, it makes your sitemap appear to be out of date, and perhaps not trustworthy. Use a tool like Xenu Link Sleuth to crawl your site and generate your XML sitemap file for you.

#3 Broken links on your site.

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. They have some great information that can help you improve your site and rankings. I've solved many problems for clients and gotten them back in the search results very quickly simply by resubmitting their sitemaps via Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Bing Webmaster Tools after fixing the problems.