Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

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Week 5: Site Structure Improvements

Last month, you took care of basic site optimization and knocked down obstacles to robot

indexing of your landing pages. This week, you’ll delve a little deeper into some techie

decisions that can improve your site’s optimization, indexing, and overall visibility success.

This week’s tasks will involve a range of SEO skills, from PR-style communica-

tion to serious server geeking. It’s a week when you will definitely want your team

queued up and clued in to your needs and reasoning. Keep your meeting calendar

handy as you review your daily assignments:

Monday

: The Spider’s-Eye View

Tuesday:

Shape Up Your Site Map

Wednesday:

Clean Up Ugly Listings

Thursday:

Your

Robots.txt

File

Friday:

PPC Quick Check

Monday: The Spider’s-Eye View

Have you ever seen those photos that show what the world looks like to a dog? Or

maybe you enjoyed the kaleidoscopic fly-cam scenes in the 1950s movie

The Fly

. Today

you’re going to learn how to take a search engine spider’s-eye view of your website.

Viewer discretion is advised: what you are about to see might be surprisingly scary.

As you learned in Chapter 3, “Eternal Truths of SEO,” a search engine spider is sim-

ply software that goes through the Internet looking at web pages and sending information

back to a central repository. It doesn’t view content in the same way human site visitors do.

Since spiders are an important—although by no means the most important—audience for

your website, you want to know how your website appears to them. Today you will use a

tool called a

spider emulator

to put on your spider’s-eye view glasses and do exactly that.

For example, here is a typical web page, as viewed through the browser.

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