On Friday, December 13, 2002, Jeremy Tapp wrote: > The Search Spider problem is another thing I'm trying to solve and > get our team to think about. [..] > it comes as a perpetual source of annoyance to see how low we rank > in search engines (especially Google) especially given that every > day we publish 3-4 articles on each site of spot on relevant content > for the markets.
> I've come to the conclusion that it must be spiders having difficulty > indexing us (I hope?!). One handy trick is to use Google to just search for pages on your site, but search for a term which will be present on every page. This way you can see how many of your pages Googlebot has indexed. A search for "site:bikemagic.com bikemagic" gives 552 results. > (a) I know our Meta Tags aren't great and I'm looking to get that > improved. > (b) I've been thinking about asking the guys to insert relevant > keywords (a required field by our CMS) into the MetaTags for each > specific article page. This won't actually help your ranking on Google, as Google doesn't read meta keyword tags, but it might not be bad idea if you have the information anyway. > (c) How does this URL rewriting scheme you mention work? In this context URL rewriting works by mapping "normal" looking URLs onto server-side scripts. E.g.: instead of http://www.bikemagic.com/news/article.asp?SP=&v=1&UAN=3057 you could have: http://www.bikemagic.com/news/article/3057/. The server gets setup to redirect any requests to /news/article* to the script /news/article.asp. That script can then split the rest of the URL up to get any other parameters. The result is friendlier looking URLs which are easier to remember and give a clearer representation of site structure. > Should I invest time getting our guys to build a spider page which > links in simple HTML to all our article pages and submit this to the > engines? I wouldn't advise it. These days search engines don't have trouble with database driven sites. > Has anyone got any advice please? Search engine ranking is a tricky area, some sites get great ranking without any effort, others have a lot of problems despite many content tweaks. Remember that the search engine robot sees your raw HTML source, not what you see in your browser. To the robot, the higher up in the HTML source text appears, the more important it is. Any non-content, e.g. HTML markup, javascript etc. only serves to make the actual content less-relevant. The robot is also looking for keywords in prominent HTML tags such as <title>...</title> and the headings (<h1>...</h1> etc.). Your site has quite a bit of HTML markup and javascript in each of the page content. Javascript functions can be put in external files (which will reduce your bandwidth usage as well), and CSS can be used to move quite a bit of your presentational markup out of your page source. How easy this would be to achieve using your CMS of choice I don't know. Your content may need a few tweaks, and it may be worth educating your content authors on some of these issues. If we use your "fitting your front end" article as an example of a typical article on your site, then "handlebars" would seem a reasonable keyword for people to search for. But if you look your page content, that word appears only once and not until half way down the page. It should at least be in your page title and your article title ("fitting your front end", which would be better in <h1>..</h1> tags), and really you'd want the word to appear a few times in the article itself. Sub-headings could also help. If someone was searching for an article on fitting controls to handlebars, then if you had "handlebars" in your page title and "controls" in a sub-heading somewhere, your page is more likely to get returned as a high result. I hope this is of some use. Another tip is to do a few searches on Google of bike-related things and take a look at the top results and see how their page content is structured. It should be of some comfort to you to know that if you've already got a popular site with great content and lots of links to it, you've already got the most difficult part of good search engine ranking out of the way! -- Tim Fountain Incutio Ltd. www.incutio.com -- http://cms-list.org/ trim your replies for good karma.
