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The
Marketleap Report
Volume
III, Issue #5, May 14, 2003
Search Engine Saturation
The Kick-Off Metric for Search Engine Marketing
by Keith Boswell
Indexed means listed, listed means
available, available means more people can find you.
Marketleap has created a free search engine marketing
tool that checks your Search Engine Saturation, or
the number of pages you have indexed at each of the
major search engines.
If you have an idea of how many pages
are in your website, and then run a Search Engine
Saturation report, you can gauge how deeply your website
is indexed by each of the search engines. Do you have
a website with 100 pages, but most of the search engines
are only indexing 10 pages?
90% more of your site is available
to people searching if you work on it. The fewer pages
you have indexed, the less keyword phrases you can
compete for. One page can't possibly rank well
for every keyword phrase that is relevant to your
business.
Once you run a report, you can click-through
the numbers from each of the major search engines
and see exactly what pages each engine has indexed
from your website. This is important because you need
to know which pages should be optimized first if you're
looking to improve results. There's no reason
to optimize pages not found in the index yet, so knowing
where to start helps.
Checking your search engine saturation
monthly is necessary because the engines are always
updating, dropping, and adding pages to improve their
indexes. If you can keep track of how much of your
site is indexed, you'll know what's working
and what still needs work.
If you're struggling to improve your
link popularity before the majority of your site is
indexed, you are skipping a major step in the search
engine optimization process, and not going after the
lowest hanging fruit. Link popularity factors more
into how pages rank than anything. Rankings are important,
but they aren't the place to focus if only 10%
of your website isn't indexed. You can concentrate
on improving your rankings once you know what the
search engines are including in their index.
Successful search engine marketing
works to get as much content listed within each of
the unique search engines as possible. This may be
through natural crawling; it may be through paid inclusion.
The more pages you have indexed, the greater the net
you are casting for keywords and opportunities to
find very targeted visitors.
We've included the tool directly
in the article so you can check the search engine
saturation of your website today. We'd be interested
to hear any thoughts or questions you have about the
tool. Send us any feedback or questions to report@marketleap.com.
Are your contact pages listed, but
not your product pages? Here are some potential reasons
why a page might not be indexed by search engines:
- When the page loads, the
address bar contains a complex URL. Complex URL's
load too many parameters, session ID's and
other symbols because they are being generated dynamically
from a database. Search engines usually won't
follow complex URL's unless they are in paid
inclusion programs.
- The links in your site
are contained in Javascript or dynamic HTML. Search
engines like text links because they can see where
they are going. The more your code hides your site
away from the search engines, the less of it will
be indexed.
- The page is seen as spam.
The page could contain invisible text or too many
keywords in the hopes of achieving a higher ranking.
In some cases, participating in linking programs
that require all users to load the same links page
onto their website will be penalized as spam. If
your goal is to fool the engines into achieving
a higher ranking, you're not giving the engines
what they are looking for.
- Different websites with
duplicate content. Some marketers buy several domain
names and then place the same content on each one
of them in hopes of achieving better rankings. The
search engines recognize identical twins when they
see them and most choose to only index one version
of the website, if any. Do you really want to be
competing with yourself? What if the search engines
index one of the domain names you bought as an after-thought
and not your original domain name? Focus on building
one good website and you'll find more success.
- Your site uses poor linking
structure. You want to keep your web pages linked
together as tightly as possible. Using frames for
links keep the search engines from seeing everything
they could. Do you have a site map that is entirely
made up of text links? This alone can be a quick
fix to get more pages indexed. Using text links
in the footers of your pages also helps the engines
index more of your website. Show the search engines
everything you want them to see easily and the number
of pages you have indexed should go up
- Your page contains a robots.txt
file that instructs the search engines to not visit
it. Robots.txt files are recognized by all the major
search engines as a way to specify that certain
things should be off limits to the search engines
because you don't want the information indexed.
You can see if you have a robots.txt file by typing
in www.yourcompany.com/robots.txt. If the file exists
you should see it there. If your robots.txt file
is saying "NO INDEX" to the engines,
it usually won't show up in search results.
Additional Tips from Marketleap for
Optimizing your Website for Search Engines
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