The vernacular is "build a site and they will come." This cliché
is only true if your site is indexed in the relevant search
engine database.
Indexing
Search engines are essentially massive databases of domains and
sub-domains for sites. When a person searches for something, the
search engine instantaneously searches the domain names to come
up with relevant listings. The method for doing this differs by
engine and involves factors beyond the scope of this article.
Instead, we are going to focus on figuring out if your site is
in these important databases.
If you want to be included in the rankings on a search engine,
your domain name has to be in the search engine database. Put
another way, you have to buy a ticket if you want to win the
lotto. Your chances of getting free traffic from rankings are
far better if you have as many urls from your site included in
the database as possible. Having just your home page indexed
isn't going to cut it.
If your site has 500 total pages, you ideally want 500 urls
included in the search engine index. While this is admittedly a
simplification of the situation, the more pages included, the
better chance you have of getting high rankings under different
keywords. The more high rankings you produce, the more free
traffic you can get and the easier it will be to survive the
loss of one ranking.
To check how many pages of your site are indexed in a particular
search engine, simply do a search on the particular engine for
"site:yourdomainname.com". Pay particular attention to Yahoo, as
it often will fail to pick up many of your pages. The result of
this search will tell you every page the engine has found on
your site and included in its database.
If you discover only a few pages have been indexed by the search
engine, you need to take a look at your site. A common problem
for sites using databases concerns dynamic urls. Many
programmers will write session ids and so on into the urls. The
search engines have massive problems reading these urls and will
often fail to include them in their databases. You have this
problem if the internal pages of your site have tails like:
"yourdomainname/id43/s-876783/product=46830
If you have this problem, the best solution is to create static
pages without the dynamic urls issues. The session ids and so on
should be moved into the code of the page and removed from the
url. You will probably need a programmer to make the fix.
If you do not have this problem, you need to figure out how to
get your site into the indexes. There are plenty of articles
telling you how. The first step, however, is just figuring out
if the search engines have found you.
About the author:
Halstatt Pires is a search engine optimization specialist with
http://www.marketingtitan.com - an Internet marketing and
advertising company in San Diego offering meta tag optimization
services and link popularity services.
