Ensuring The Search Engines Can Read And Index Your Site Part 2

How To Get Your Complete Web Site Indexed

Search engines will only index sites that appear important on the web. In order to boost your site's importance on the web and to ensure it is indexed fully and often you will need to do the following:

• Make sure you have plenty of inbound links. Directories are a great place to start building one way, non-reciprocated links.
• Make sure you have static HTML pages for the spiders to index. If your whole site is dynamic there are programs and/or techniques that can make it appear static.
• Ensure there is nothing in the robots.txt file blocking access - a common problem is that blocked directories need a trailing '/' i.e. Disallow: /images/. Ensure there is no robots meta tag on the page that could be blocking access. There are programs available that emulate a spider indexing your site - use one of these to ensure your site can be read.
• Change your text often. Add pages as often as you can - aim for one new page a day, if you can't manage that then at least one new page a week.

If you are having issues getting only one or two pages indexed by the search engine, you should add a site map page to your site. A site map is simply a listing of all of the pages within the site and includes direct (not javascript) links to all pages. Adding a link from the home page to the site map will ensure your whole site gets indexed correctly.

Bear in mind that if a page was designed to be a popup, a visitor might hit this page directly from the search engine. Therefore a menu should be added so they can return to the main site

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