Chapter10.Get Your Site Indexed

Chapter 10. Get Your Site Indexed

"You've got to be in it to win it," the lottery commercials blare, but they do have a point. Winners did have to buy a ticket, or they would never have won. To win the organic search lottery, your site needs to buy its tickets, tooyou need the pages of your site indexed. The more pages you have indexed, the more chances you have to win the search lottery. And take heart, because you have much better odds at winning the search lottery than the Powerball lottery.

To win, however, you need to know the rules of the gameand to play by them. In the search lottery, you must learn the rules that spiders play by, so that your site plays by them, too. After you understand what spiders cannot or will not do, you can make sure that your site does not run afoul of the rules. Because when you break these spider rules, your page will not be indexed. And if your page is not in the index, it cannot be found by searchers.

It might sound simple, but getting Web pages indexed by search engines can be challenging for corporate Web sites. Corporate Web sites are often designed without spider rules in mind, so their pages are frequently left out of search indexes. As you start your organic search marketing efforts, getting your pages indexed is the first step to take, because it can take some time for your team to correct the design problems you find on your site. You need to discover whether your pages are indexed, to diagnose indexing problems when they are not, and to correct them.

This chapter answers three basic questions:

• What if your site is not indexed? Most corporate Web sites have at least some of their pages indexed, but a few sites have no pages indexed at all. We show you how you can check on yours and what to do in the rare event that all of your pages are missing from the search index.

• How many pages on your site are indexed? In Chapter 7, "Measure Your Search Marketing Success," we did a quick assessment of whether the landing pages for your first search marketing campaign were indexed. In this section, we look across your entire site to see where you stand.

• How do you get more pages indexed? That's the most important question to answer. What problems are preventing your site from having all of its pages indexed and what can be done to correct them?

Remember, for organic search, pages that are missing from the index can never be found by searchers. This chapter helps you include as many of your pages as possible in each search index. Let's start by addressing an unusual but critical situationwhat if your site has no pages in the search indexes?