For many people a five or six page web site is all they need or
want, but for others, selling services and products on the
internet, a hundred page site is barely adequate – if you’re one
of those companies then here are some tips on making the most of
your site on Google and other deep search engines.
One of the sites we manage is 520 pages packed with content and
informative articles. It has some 10 / 12 levels of pages in its
structure and we became aware that Google only indexed 126 of
those 520 pages, what was going on?
Maximising each page
We worked diligently with the web site owner to optimise each
page, ensuring it had a unique <TITLE> and the page content was
rich in the KEYWORDS for that topic, for instance if you’re
trying to get onto Google with ‘content management systems’ and
the phrase ‘content management systems’ does not appear on the
page in HTML text then you won’t hit the top 1000!! Similarly if
the phrase ‘content management system’ appears lots you will
still fail because Google sees ‘system’ and ‘systems’ as 2
totally separate words
Remember, each page has a <TITLE>, <BODY> <KEYWORDS>,
<DESCRIPTION> and ALT TAGS if you, or the designer has simply
duplicated another page, as a template, in the design all your
pages will have the same attributes as far as the spider is
concerned.
Spider depth
Most spiders do not index below level 3 and therefore they do
not find what may be very important pages at all. In addition we
noticed with Google Page Ranking that the Index Page was 5/10, a
level 2 page on the same site was 4/10 and a level 3 page was
3/10. Presumably pages beyond level 3 are considered so
insignificant that the spider has been programmed to ignore them.
In addition the spider was stopping dead at drop down menus and
graphic links it could not move beyond. Spiders essentially
follow HTML text links and that’s about it. If you stick to that
rule you won’t go too far wrong.
Our challenge was therefore to bring every page, no matter where
it was in the site, to a level 3 position at least – without
changing the structure of the site itself, so the spider would
index it and the page ranking would be higher. This would give
us 520 marketable, optimised pages rather that 126.
The solution was quite simple. A site map – we simply spent a
few hours setting up a site map with a link from the index page
( making the site map level 2) and then an HTML text link to
every page on the site, making every page on the site at least
level 3.
The next time the site was spidered by Google, there it was, 520
content rich optimised pages and an increase in traffic of 1000%
Big sites, make the most of them, don’t keep your content hidden
under a bushel!!
About the author:
John Saxon is technical director of site-pro limited a site
offering free tips, tools and articles for web site optimisation
– the site may be visited at http://www.site-pro.co.uk
