What should a new website first do ?
All websites are scanned by search engines by a method known as ‘crawling’ or ‘tracking’ and it is done by trackers referred to as ‘search engine spiders’. Search engine Optimization (SEO) is a method to optimize one’s website by getting it placed higher in the non-advertised section of search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN, one should make good use of keywords within the site to ensure that it achieves a higher rank in the search engines. However, the first thing is to ensure that one’s website is actually being tracked by the search engines.
- One should type out the URL or web address of one’s website in the search box of these search engines and see if the search engines return any results. If only the domain name or the URL is returned without any descriptive text or content text, then the website has been indexed but not scanned for content by the search engine. If no search results are returned, then the page hasn’t been indexed even. One needs to create links to the website to make it more accessible to search engines. A popular method is linking all other pages of the website back to the home page so as to increase the number of web pages that link to the home page of the website.
- If the website has been indexed, generally it is the home page which has been indexed. To find out, which other pages of the website have been indexed by the search engine type ‘site’, ‘:’ and then the domain name. (Example—site:http://www.manutd.com) This will show all the web pages from that site which have been indexed by the search engine. The search engine also shows on every page of results the number of total search results. That many pages from the website have been indexed by that particular search engine. In Google, the last page of search results has an option of showing all the search results without omitting anything. This function can be used to find out precisely how many web pages from the site have been indexed by the search engine. To find out how many pages have been scanned for content in addition to being indexed, one needs to watch out for page description in the search result or page content following the URL.
After finding out whether the website has been indexed and tracked for content and which pages from the website and how many have been scanned by the search engines, it is time to move on to increasing the pages’ ranks with the search engines. For this, keywords should be used effectively.
These are some of the first things that a new website developer should do after putting up one’s website on the internet. The website is incomplete if it does not figure prominently in search results.