Do the Search Engines Know Your Website?
by: Chet Childers
Are you considering a search engine promotion campaign to improve your website's search engine visibility? To aid in your decision, have you checked your website to determine its search engine awareness?
Perhaps you may be thinking why do I need to check my website? Do you remember going to the doctor for an illness? Hopefully, your doctor performed some tests to diagnose your illness before prescribing your medication. If not, you may have gotten some very undesirable results.
In the case of your website, you need to diagnose the patient and determine the extent of your website's search engine visibility. Based on your findings, you can decide to focus on standard search results or paid search results.
Your checks should be done in the Google and Yahoo search engines since they are the major search engines in today's marketplace. As an option, you should consider MSN since they have recently released their search engine. It is only a matter of time before they are considered a player, if not already.
Your first check determines if your website is indexed in Google or Yahoo. Think about the card catalog in your library. Each book has a card in the card catalog signifying the indexing of the book in the library. In this exercise you'll check if your website has a "card" in the Google or Yahoo card catalog.
The first exercise is opening your web browser to the Google - www.google.com, Yahoo - www.yahoo.com or MSN - www.msn.com website. Enter your website's URL, www.yourdomainname.com, in the search box and review the search results. Your website's domain name or URL should appear in the search results if your site is indexed.
If just the domain name or URL is listed, the website has been indexed but not crawled by the search engine spider. A domain name and several lines of descriptive text indicate the website has been crawled by the search engine spider to determine the website's content. Also, look for the link "Cached Page" or a similar phrase. This is another indication the website has been crawled for content by the search engine.
Now, you should know if your website is indexed and has a "card" in the search engine card catalog. Your second check evaluates the extent of your website's indexing by determining which website pages are indexed by the respective search engine.
The second exercise is opening your web browser to the Google, Yahoo or MSN website. Enter the "site" command and your website's URL in the search box in the format "site:www.yourdomainname.com" (quotation marks not required) and review the search results. All of your website's pages indexed by the queried search engine should be listed. At the top of the search results screen look for "Results X - Y of about Z from www.yourdomainname.com" or a similar phrase. The value for Z indicates the total number of pages indexed by the queried search engine for your website.
In addition, you might see the comment "repeat the search with the omitted results included" in the results listing. Since the search engine does not always show the entire listing, you can click the link and view the complete list of your website's indexed pages.
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Do the Search Engines Know Your Website?
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