Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

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you look at the “spider’s-eye view” of your website in Chapter 8, “Month Two: Estab-

lish the Habit.”

A server outage interrupted indexing.

Perhaps your pages are linked and structured

properly but the robot came crawling just at the moment your systems administrator

spilled his Jolt Cola on the server. The robot found no site to index. There’s nothing

you can do in a situation like this but wait until the next indexing cycle. You may wish

to consider a PPC or paid inclusion campaign to fill in the gaps while you’re waiting.

And if this seems to be a regular occurrence, look into a more reliable hosting situa-

tion. (By the way, for the perfect balance of caffeine and server protection, your sysad-

min should switch to coffee with the little sippy lid.)

Your site is too big.

Maybe your landing pages exist alongside thousands of other

pages in your site. Robots don’t index every page from every site, so they may simply

have moved on before they got to the ones you think are most important. This is

another quick fix: just be sure to add HTML links that place your landing pages no

more than two clicks away from the home page.

You told the robots to stay away.

That wasn’t very nice of you! Next month, we’ll get

into the details of how you communicate with robots through a file on your site called

robots.txt

. Today, double-check that none of your landing pages has a tag on it that

says

meta name="robots" content="noindex"

Your site is being penalized.

It’s possible, but unlikely, that you are violating a search

engine’s guidelines without knowing it. If none of the other problems are striking a

chord and you are absolutely sure that your pages are not present in the index, and

especially if you were ever engaged in questionable SEO practices in the past, this

might be your situation. It’s a tough one. Probably your best strategy is to post a note

in an SEO forum (you’ll learn about our favorites later in the Plan) and see if the com-

munity has any suggestions.

Thursday: Site Text

Has there been something about your site’s text that has been setting your teeth on

edge since you started learning about SEO? Is there anything in the content that you

know is working against your site’s search engine visibility? Or are your keywords

nowhere to be found? Now it’s time to address these issues. Today is a momentous

Now:

Try to identify the reasons your pages are not being indexed.Write down your findings, and deter-

mine whom you need to discuss them with in your organization.

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