Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

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Wednesday: Robot Walk-Through

You’re all dressed up and the hors d’oeuvres are on the table. But is there a big Do Not

Enter sign on your door? You know the basics of how the robots find your site, and

you know whether or not your landing pages are indexed. Today you’ll knock down

any barriers that exist between the robots and your landing pages. And even if all of

your landing pages are already indexed, today you’ll learn more about keeping robots

happy so they’ll always stick around for the toast.

Take a look at your Baseline Monthly Report or your Rank Tracking Worksheet

to determine whether any of your landing pages are not indexed. Here are several rea-

sons a robot might not be reaching your landing page and possible ways to fix the

problem:

Robots can’t follow your links.

This could be as simple as a having no links from your

home page or your main site navigation to one or all of your landing pages. Or maybe

the links to your landing pages are created using hard-to-follow code, such as JavaScript

pull-down menus or pop-up scripts. Often, this is an easy fix: just add standard HTML

text links from anywhere on your home page to your landing page. (You’ll probably

want a site map as well. We’ll cover that next month.)

No stand-alone landing pages.

Maybe your site was developed in Flash, in which

case it really isn’t a group of individual pages but is rather one big file that’s hard or

impossible for the search engines to index as separate pages. Perhaps your landing

pages are generated dynamically or they show up only when a form is submitted or a

find these pages. Or, perhaps your landing pages are built in

frames

, which means dif-

ferent elements of the page are broken apart into different URLs, and it’s impossible to

link to any one page individually.

In the long run, we’d like to see your entire site revamped as much as necessary to

get robots nibbling at every little crumb, which may mean a full overhaul of your site

structure. For today, our priority is getting those landing pages indexed! That means at

the very least rebuilding your landing pages as completely separate, linkable URLs. If

your landing pages are built in frames—Achooo! There’s a lot of dust on this website!

Get ready to have them rebuilt with their own URLs.

Your site asks too much from the visitor.

If the queen came to visit, you wouldn’t turn

her away if she wasn’t wearing the right hat. Treat your spiders the same way! Some

websites won’t display to a viewer who doesn’t have JavaScript. Guess who doesn’t

have JavaScript? The robots! Some websites require cookies. Guess who won’t accept

cookies? You get the point. You’ll need to eliminate these requirements on your landing

pages. If you’re not sure what your site requires, you’ll get a better sense of it when

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