Step Wise SEO

A very basic fact of SEO is this: Before your website can rank well on the search engines, it must be indexed, or present, in the search engines.

Is your website there to be found? You are going to find out by answering these questions:

• How many of my site’s pages are indexed?

• Are my top landing pages indexed?

Total Pages Indexed on Your Site
Follow these steps to find out the total number of pages within your domain that are present on the major search engines:

• Starting with Google, perform a search to find pages from within your domain only. Search engines have a special syntax for finding all pages in a site;

for example, on Google you would type site:yourdomain.com (using your own site address in place of yourdomain.com) in the search box.

• Make a note of the number of pages returned. This is the total number of pages indexed from your domain. There are about 61,500 pages indexed within the domain mudcat.org.

• Repeat for MSN, Yahoo!, and Ask. This search can be tricky on some search engines.

Keep in mind that there are limitations to this value. The total number of indexed pages may include broken links and old pages on your site. Think of it as a “big picture” number for watching trends or catching big drop-offs.

Landing Pages Indexed
In addition to checking the total pages indexed, you’ll want to determine whether each of your landing pages is indexed.

After all, you wouldn’t want to put a lot of time into optimizing a page that the robots can’t see. Perform the following steps for each landing page:

• Enter the full URL of the landing page into Google’s search box. If you get a listing for the exact page you were seeking, your page is indexed!

• If the exact page you’re looking for doesn’t show up for the full URL, double-check to make sure it’s not indexed.

Find a unique string of HTML text on your page-one that is not likely to exist on another site-and search for it in quotes.

Searching for a unique term like “Robert Johnson, King of the Delta Blues. Rumors and Tales swirl with the name” isn’t likely to bring up anyone’s site but the one you’re looking for.

• Perform the same check with Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.

My Site Doesn’t Have Typical Landing Pages!
For most SEO campaigns, and especially for the SEO plan, it makes sense to focus your efforts on optimizing and tracking a small number of landing pages (no more than 10) on your site.

However, there may be some of you who do not follow this system. For example, bloggers should consider every posting to be an equally important landing page.

Large catalog sites may follow a shallow-wide approach, with the expectation that users can enter the website via hundreds of product pages.

And for some businesses, the choice of landing pages will shift with the season.

When your situation calls for a large or changing number of landing pages, you will have to adjust accordingly:

You may wish to track more pages, or just your home page, or a select group of sample pages chosen from different areas of your site.

You may wish to do separate SEO campaigns in sequence, or even scale up Your SEO Plan.

Yes, this SEO plan is scalable. Give it 10 hours a day, and you can multiply your number of landing pages accordingly.