Thursday, January 8, 2009

Some Key Tips and Ideas on Web Site Indexing

By Irmin J. Roybal

Proper indexing of your web site is a key condition for success of your online business. Before search engines start listing your site in search results, your site must be indexed. In other words, search engines must know about existence of your web site or newly added pages.

Site Indexing can be done in two general ways. First: submission of your site to search engines directly. Second, getting a robot of search engine to crawl over your pages and indexing them. It can find your site using links from other pages. Thus, although straightforward submission seem like a good idea, your site may get better weight in the engine rating, if it will be visited from a link of another site. Clearly, if someone links to your site, therefore, it is useful.

The terms of site indexing vary from couple days to a month(s). It is a proven fact that having several links from sites with high PR substantially accelerate indexing. The fastest indexer on the web today is Google.

When new pages are added to the site, the indexing of such pages can happen faster if the site is frequently renewed. In other words, any site which updates and increases it content on a daily basis will have an advantage of faster indexing comparing to a site which is updated weekly, monthly and so on. The faster updates, the better for users must be the site.

Here are several factors, which should be taken into account for faster indexing:

- The distance between your main page and any other page of your site shall not exceed three clicks;

- Build a map of your site with all inner links. Post a link to the site map in your index page.

- Avoid making large pages, the size should not exceed 100 " 200 kB. Robots rarely crawl further than such size.

- Try to use human-friendly URLs in your links, too parametrically complicated links make the indexing harder;

- Indexing instructions can be made with the aid of robots.txt file, use it.

You can check on progress in indexing of your web site (or new pages) either via direct inquiry to search engine, or using log files of your web host. If you will see a sudden fluctuation in the number of indexed pages, dont be surprised. This happens time to time because of temporary outage of server or some referrers, or, perhaps, because of a change in search engine algorithm.

Have a nice indexing!

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