Do Search Engines list your site?

Most website owners want to be found at the top of the search pages. Fortunately for the serious marketer, you can still rely on the poor quality, the poor structure and the lack of promotion of the majority of your potential competitors to give you a good chance of a place on the first page.

Before you arrive at this happy position, there is a key intermediate hurdle to clear.

If the search engines have not indexed your site they cannot include it in any consideration for a top ranking.  Fortunately there is an easy way to check if your site has been listed at all, and if so how many pages have been included.

For Google, MSN and Yahoo, search for your own URL, but put 'site:' immediately in front. e.g.

site:www.yourdomain.com

You should then see how many of your pages are listed. You will also see what information is shown about each page. This is an immediate measure of how well your site has been optimised.  You can see the words used to describe the page and workout where they came from.  Conversely, you can see where the spider has failed to pick up such essential information.

Compare a well-optimised page like this:

Assistant Quantity Surveyors job in Quantity Surveying within ...
Assistant Quantity Surveyors vacancy in Quantity Surveying within Building
Contracting in Reading and Central London is one of many jobs handled by Maxim ...
www.maximrecruitment.co.uk/JobDetail.aspx?JobID=2294 - 25k

With a page that is not yet registering suitable information:

www.driversdreamdays.co.uk/product.asp?id=220

Then you know where the next work has to be done!

Talk to you next month,

Regards

Stephen Orr