Global Search Pros

Anytime I talk about what I do someone asks me for advice on improving their rankings. At Global Search Pros, we’ve moved away from using rankings as a key metric (though we still track them) and instead emphasize conversions and sales data. That said, traffic is still important and if you have invested time in keyword research, on-site optimization, and link building then you will want to see it payoff.

Below are 3 easy, but often overlooked task that can help your SEO efforts. They are also good practice for any webmaster. Experienced SEOs and webmasters will not see anything amazing here. This post is really about helping small companies and newbies get the most bang for their buck.

1.) Schedule Monthly URL Submissions to the Top Search Engines to Improve your Indexing and Visibility

While Google & Company will eventually get to you if you have any inbound links, waiting for them to make the discovery can be time consuming. Depending on your directory structure and what technology you run, it may take months for them to index your entire site and some key pages may only get spidered at the tail end. Of course, your internal linking structure can help with this but with ten minutes of cut’n'paste work, once a month, you can improve the speed and thoroughness of each crawl.

Start by going to the submission pages for the 3 majors:

• Google Url Submission
• Yahoo Url Submission
• Live Search URL Submission

Submit your top-level domain (e.g. http://www.example.com), and your top 2-3 content pages. After you’ve submitted, make a note of the date and schedule another round of submissions for next month. Thats it.

2.)Install a Robots.txt file to limit what pages are spidered by the SEs

Robots or ‘bot’ are the little programs that SEs and others use to find and index your content. The point of the robots.txt file is to tell these little suckers where to go…and where not to go.

Most people have a lot more material on their server than is visible to a visitor: You probably have some old versions of the site, maybe a Scripts folder, and (if your site requires login) the controls and content for members. All this stuff is essential to your visitors but problematic for bots and your rankings.

When a bot comes to your site, it wants to follow every link it finds. If it goes deep enough it can find login pages and other site files that our not part of your intended presentation. While your visitor will probably not find the different drafts of page you keep on the server, the bot will and will index them as if they are something you want people to find.

Imagine the nightmare if you’ve spent weeks redesigning your site, but because you didn’t block the old files Google keeps showing your old site files in search results.

Robots.txt files are super easy to make. Create a text file and save it as robots.txt in the root directory of your site. Now here is what you start with:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

“User-agent” is the default name for bots, and the “*” just means any bots (so you don’t have to list them all). ‘Disallow’ tells the bot not to go to the directory or file listed. For example to block your /images folder, you’d write

User-agent: *
Disallow: /images

Start by taking a good luck at your directories. If a directory doesn’t have files you want the search engines to find then block it. Your IT guy or hosting company may have some documentation on this, so check their help files or Kbase. Thats it.

Using a robots.txt file can reduce the time it takes to index your site by removing file-bloat from your server. It can also cleanup your rankings by removing duplicate or error-filled content from your site (think draft pages with incorrect urls and the like).

3.)Fix broken links

If you have Google Webmaster tools installed, then it can tell you what 404 (page not found) errors your site has. Otherwise, you’ll have to use the reports from your hosting company. Find the links pointing to the ‘missing’ pages and correct them or remove the pages from the index (an option in Google Webmaster).

Depending on the bot, 4o4s can completely stop a spider crawl, so this should help your indexing. More importantly, you will be removing a major annoyance for visitors.

While you are working on this, you might also want to create a custom page to handle 404 errors.