Do the Search Engines Know Your Website?

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. Think about the card catalog in your library. Each book has a card in the card catalog signifying the indexing of the book in the library. 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.

Now, you should know if your website is indexed and has a "card" in the search engine card catalog. Your second check evaluates the extent of your website's indexing by determining which website pages are indexed by the respective 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. We'll review the commands for the three major search engines. The other search engines have similar commands.

Google & MSN

Open your web browser to the Google or MSN website. Enter the "link" command and your website's URL in the search box in the format "link: www.yourdomainname.com" (quotation marks not required) and review the search results.

All the external website pages linked to your website and indexed by the queried search engine should be listed. At the top of the search results screen look for "Results X - Y of Z linking to www.yourdomainname.com" or a similar phrase. The value for Z indicates the total number of externally linked pages to your website.

Yahoo

Open your web browser and go to the Yahoo website. Enter the "linkdomain" and "-site" command and your website's URL in the search box in the format "linkdomain:www.yourdomainname.com -site:www.yourdomainname.com" (quotation marks not required). The "-site" command is used exclude the internally linked website pages from the results.

Review the search results. All the external website pages linked to your website and indexed by Yahoo should be listed. At the top right of the search results screen look for "Results X - Y of Z linking to www.yourdomainname.com." The value for Z indicates the total number of externally linked pages to your website.

Do not be alarmed if the displayed results from Yahoo and MSN are significantly different from Google. Recently, Google began displaying limited or no results from the "link" command. The general conclusion from the search engine optimization community was that Google felt disclosing the link information might possibly share too much information regarding their ranking algorithm and its impact on a specific website.

From these three simple checks you should have determined if the search engines know the existence of your website and be prepared to select the proper search engine promotion campaign. A pay-per-click search engine campaign would be a good choice if your website's search engine visibility is limited and the time deadline to achieve your desired search engine rankings is short. If the time to achieve the desired search engine rankings is not critical to your website's marketing plans, then a search engine optimization campaign to improve the standard search results could be a logical decision.

About the Author

Chet Childers is a successful Internet marketer utilizing the power and quick response of pay-per-click marketing to increase website visibility and profitability. Click http://www.ThePayPerClickMarketer.com and enroll in our e-course, "Discover Tips and Secrets for Pay-Per-Click Marketing Success," or visit http:http://www.ChetChilders.com.

---

Search Engines from a Webmaster Perspective

By now, virtually every webmaster has heard or read that... Read More

Being dumped by Google? Learn how to avoid becoming a victim next time around!

After Google latest update nicknamed "Florida", many webmasters discovered that... Read More

Is New MSN Search More Precise? Just Ask Google

MSN finally unleashed its new search technology to the world... Read More

Website Submission - What You May Not Know About Search Engine Indexing

Getting your website listed in the search engines is relatively... Read More

The 7 Points of Do-It-Yourself SEO

Ever felt intimidated at the convoluted, jargon-ridden information about Internet... Read More

Five Tips to Improve Your Chances with Google et al.

"Dear David: I just created a website on baby toy... Read More

All You Need to Know About Your Website Traffic is Contained in 5 Key Stats

You built that content rich web page optimized for your... Read More

How to Make a Title Tag that Search Engines Will Love

Making the following changes to your title tag can help... Read More

Search Engine Traffic: Winning With Content

Targeted traffic is the lifeblood of any online business. The... Read More

How to Prevent Duplicate Content with Effective Use of the Robots.txt and Robots Meta Tag

Duplicate content is one of the problems that we regularly... Read More

SEO - Google Sitemaps Explained

Once again I seem to be writing about Google. The... Read More

Google Patent Application ? Linking

The recent patent application filed by Google details numerous items... Read More

Do Not Ever Link to a Site Without Doing This First!

Links are a crucial part of attaining high search rankings,... Read More

You Have More Web Sites Than You Think You Have: The Importance of Deep Submission

If I ask you how many web sites do you... Read More

How Important is PageRank, Really?

Webmasters can spend most of their waking hours doing everything... Read More

More Hits are Good for My Website - A Myth You Should Avoid

I hear this all the time. "I can get you... Read More

What You Did Wrong With Your Domain Names!

Trying to improve search engine rankings is just like a... Read More

See No Google, Hear No Google, Speak No Google

That's right - I dreamt of a World Wide Web... Read More

Why SEO Will Make or Break You, Part 1

Today's article is about the wonders of SEO. SEO is... Read More

SEO Expert Guide - Free Site Promotion (PR) (part 6/10)

In parts 1 - 5 you learnt how to develop... Read More

Getting Listed in the ODP, Google Directory

First of all, the Google directory is really just the... Read More

10 Easy Steps to Boost Your Search Engine Rankings!

In order that someone finds your website and buys your... Read More

Google ? A Bit of History

The first question most people have is, "What the heck... Read More

Search Engine Spiders Lost Without Guidance - Post This Sign!

The robots.txt file is an exclusion standard required by all... Read More

Is This A ?DMOZ Killer? In The Making?

Is building a Human-Edited Fully "Democratic" Search Directory Possible?The independent... Read More

An Introduction to Google Sitemaps

... and why I 'm dying to get finally in... Read More

2 Powerful Ways To Capitalize on Your Search Engine Traffic

Many marketers know that search engine marketing is among one... Read More

Internet Marketing and SEO

Have you ever seen any email offers of getting you... Read More

Search Engine Optimisation: The Soon to be Impossible Dream!

There are today search engine and internet marketing services, in... Read More

Free Search Engine Advertising: 10 Secret Ways To Indirectly Race To The Top Of Search Engines

Do you have a website that has little or no... Read More

Things You Must Realize When Searching

For the uninitiated, searching for web pages can seem a... Read More

Why Fear? Now Change Your Filenames Without Disturbing Search Engines/Visitors And Rank Well

By now, you know that to rank well in the... Read More

Finding The True PR Of A Page?

I had an email "conversation" this last week which I... Read More