Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

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Wednesday: Indexed Pages

A very basic fact of SEO is this: Before your website can rank well on the search

engines, it must be

indexed

, or present, in the search engines. Is your website there to

be found? Today you are going to find out by answering these questions:

• How many of my site’s pages are indexed?

• Are my top landing pages indexed?

In the next sections, we’ll show how you’ll do it.

Total Pages Indexed on Your Site

Follow these steps to find out the total number of pages within your domain that are

present on the major search engines:

• Starting with Google, perform a search to find pages from within your domain

only. Search engines have a special syntax for finding all pages in a site; for

example, on Google you would type

site:yourdomain.com

(using your own site

address in place of

yourdomain.com

) in the search box.

• Make a note of the number of pages returned. This is the total number of pages

indexed from your domain. For example, in Figure 6.5 you can see that there are

about 61,500 pages indexed within the domain mudcat.org.

• Repeat for MSN, Yahoo!, and Ask. This search can be tricky on some search

engines. See our companion website at

www.yourseoplan.com

for an up-to-date

list of search shortcuts and instructions.

Figure 6.5

Google search results for Site:

www.mudcat.org

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