Web Marketing all-in-one for Dummies®
by Ian Lurie, Elizabeth Marsten, Michael Becker, John Arnold, Marty Dickinson
Chapter 3. Eliminating Search Engine Roadblocks
In This Chapter
Ensuring search engine visibility
Avoiding problems
Finding and fixing broken links
Minimizing code bloat
One way or another, business owners often block search engines from reading their content. And by doing so, they're cutting off a huge segment of their audience. If a search engine can't find your content, it can't index it, which means that it can't determine relevance. When this happens, you don't get ranked.
In this chapter, I cover a range of ways to ensure visibility, find and fix problems, and avoid problems that create search engine roadblocks. I also demonstrate how when a search engine reads your Web site, it does so as the simplest, least-flexible Web browser in the world. In the rest of this chapter, I touch on only a few of the thousands of ways to create search engine roadblocks. If you use a little common sense, though, you can easily test your Web site for problems: Use the Web Developer Toolbar to check your entire site with CSS and JavaScript turned off; fix broken links; and write good, clean, fast-loading code.
Ensuring Search Engine Visibility
I've seen four Web sites in the last year disappear from the Google rankings because a developer put a tagline on every page of the site that read:
meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"
Chances are that the developer put that tag there to prevent search engines from reading the site while she was building it. It's like covering a painting until it's unveiled. ...
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