Having spoken with quite a few people who are struggling with the basics of SEO, I figured I’d do a series for the people who might find it useful. This series won’t be in any particular teaching order, I’ll just write them as I think of them, or as people ask questions. Jump in at any time. Everyone has to start somewhere!
It’s important to know what pages in your site are indexed. You don’t have to check this regularly, maybe once every few months. It’s sometimes surprising what I find when I do this for a client’s site – pdf reports not meant for general viewing, privacy policies, random sitemaps, etc.
Why not take some time right now to do a check on your own site. Here’s how…
Go to Google and type in
site:yourdomain.com
Obviously substitute yourdomain.com for the url of your site. For example, if you were to do one of this site it would look like this:
This will return a list of every page on your site that is indexed by Google. If Page A is higher on the list than Page B, this generally means that Page A has more PageRank than Page B, which means it’s more likely to rank higher for a search term if all other things were equal.
If you have, say a privacy policy that’s high on the list, you may want to reduce the number of links pointing to it.
If an entire category of pages shouldn’t be there, but is, add that category to your robots.txt file.
I’ll post again soon on SEO 101, but in the meantime, please send in your SEO questions and I’ll do my best to answer them. If you’re more advanced, please send in questions that you think beginners SHOULD know, but don’t know that they don’t know :)
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