Search engines examine web sites and catalog terms contained therein so they may provide their future search clients with the most pertinent results. This process is known as “spidering”. Software known as a “spider” crawls the web following links and assessing every page they can find.

Unfortunately, incorrect (or maybe just old style) design can prevent these spiders from following the navigation through your site and indexing all your pages. The use of Flash for navigation, for example, prevents spiders from reaching your other pages. For optimum access by spiders, straight text or CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) navigation is the preferred choice.

Obviously, it is everybody’s aim to appear on the first page of any search results for a given key word or phrase. Another factor that contributes greatly to improving search engine rankings for your site is the quantity and quality of other sites that link to it. The more links the better and if a link is from a site that the search engines already rank highly, the more weight is attached to the link, thus improving the status of your site. (The search engines particularly like links from .edu and .gov sites).

There are many ways to create such “backlinks” as you will learn from coming materials we will be providing. In the meantime, a word of caution: Try to grow your backlinks gradually. A sudden large increase in the number of sites linking to yours may convince the likes of Google that you are “spamming” the search engines and your ranking could be penalized instead of improved.

A quick and useful tool to find out how many of your pages have been indexed and to see how many other sites link to yours is provided by Yahoo! at:

https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com

Simple enter your web site address and click on the Explore URL button to find out how many pages have been indexed, how many backlinks you have and which sites are providing them. (NOTE: If your site is quite new or recently redesigned, it might not have been indexed as yet so don’t panic if there is only one page shown in the results).

You can also use the tool to analyze your competitors too. There are many factors involved the algorithms the search engines use to rank a web site but using this tool to find out how many pages and how many backlinks your competitors have, can provide a useful target for you to achieve to usurp their ranking.

Hello! Thanks for visiting my blog. The purpose of this blog is the share ideas about Internet Marketing. The more I find out the more fascinated I become. I hope to share what I learn and provide my readers with an opportunity to assist in my education.  Please feel free to reduce my ignorance at any time!