SEO, The first step, getting indexed

The first step to a search engine marketing campaign is to initially get it indexed by all major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, etc. The key to getting your website indexed is to first have it properly organized.  Many beginners to search engine optimization overlook this piece. When a website is properly organized a search engine’s crawler, finds it easy to crawl through your pages. There are manysearch engine optimization techniques that can be used in order to properly format and organize your website’s directory structure.

Steps you should take before submitting your website

A search engine such as Google will index your page after around 3 days, if your website returns and error or has broken links you have lost your chance. Since nobody knows when the crawler might return, it is imperative that you make sure your website is ready. When it comes to getting indexed, you only get one chance, which is why there are a few very important steps you need to take before you submit your website for indexing. You must bear in mind however that getting your website indexed, will not increase web traffic, and it is merely a first step towards optimizing your website.

Step no. 1

You need to check your website for broken links, one way to do this is to click each link to see if it works, and if the images load.  A tool I found and like to use to automate this is the W3C Link Checker, http://validator.w3.org/checklink.  Just plugin your site, identify how deep you want to search (recursion depth), and hit the Check button. Also check that each page of your website has a descriptive title, ideally with your targeted keywords within the title.

Step no. 2

Many beginners over look the fact that they need to create a site map for their website. A sitemap with have a .xml extension and will contain all the URLs on your website. If you don’t know how to create a sitemap you can use many of the freely available online tools to create your sitemap (plugin ‘free sitemap tool’ in your favorite search engine). Once your site map is created, you should go ahead and upload the sitemap file to your website’s root directory.

Step no. 3

Once your site map is created, you are now ready to start submitting your website to various search engines. A sitemap will help the crawler, crawl though your website’s pages in a much more efficient way than without it.

Protect sensitive data

A lot of beginners over look the power of the robot.txt file. A robot.txt file is a file in a websites root directory, containing specific instructions to a search engine’s crawler, indicating which pages to index and which to not. Creating a robot.txt file is simple, if you don’t know how; there are hundreds of free tools you can use to create a robot.txt file.

As a rule of thumb all sensitive data and web pages should be disallowed in your robot.txt file, which means that a website’s crawler will not index them. While certainly not foolproof, this is probably the quickest way to keep sensitive data on your website out of the reach of hackers, who regularly use search engines such as Google to search for sensitive data.

Find out if your website has been indexed.

Some people think that if you measure web traffic, you can find out if your website has been indexed, which is not always true. And while it certainly increases your chances, getting indexed by a search engine does not guarantee increase web traffic…topics for another day.  There are a number of ways to find out if your website has been indexed. The best and easiest way is to type your URL into the search engine’s search box. For instance if you want to find out if Google has indexed your web site, you can type in www.xyz.com (where xyz is your domain name) into the search box. The date your website was indexed will be displayed on the left of the search results. You can also check your website’s log/stats to see when it was indexed.  These are usually available with your hosting companies management console for your site (my host has a couple, I like AWSTATS best).

Conclusion
When it comes to search engine marketing and search engine optimization, there are many initial steps that people miss out on, which is why they fail. In order to successfully optimize your website, you need to first utilize the most basic and easiest search engine optimization techniques, before you move on to more advanced strategies.