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. 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.
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.
Your third check determines the number of inbound links from other
websites to your website. The number of inbound links is very
important in the ranking algorithms of many of the search engines. The
commands for this exercise are slightly different between the search
engines. For google and msn your command is "link:www.yourdomain.com"
and for yahoo you can use "linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com". Did you see
any links or not?
If you have then in what number as depending on
these number your website will perform in Google. So if you rank below
or even not ranked in 1000 means that you don't have backword link and
you should opt for SEO. But if you have enough backword links then you
again you should opt for SEO. To cure you website.