How to.... check if your site is built for search engines.

With our recent exploits at Technology for Marketing (TFM) (see state of uk web design) and at the Search Engine Strategies Conference (SES) last week, it was surprising how many website owners, webmasters and web designers had no idea how to check their site for the simplest of accessibility to search engines.

So I've decided to put a series of "How to" documents together which will be run as a series over the coming weeks.

Checking for Frames
The first check is for frames in the site. This can be done easily by looking at the source code of your web page.

You are looking for the word

FRAMESET

This can be done easily by keying CTRL F and doing a search in the text source code for FRAMESET. If you do find such an entry it is highly likely the site will not perform in the search engines.

Checking for crawler accessibility
This checks the way your site navigates and how the search crawler programs move around the site

To start with download Googles toolbar.

http://toolbar.google.com/T4/

Once installed you'll need to go to options and turn on the PageRank indicator, which looks like this;-

Go to your own site. If your site has a zero PageRank on the homepage you will need to acquire a link from a site that does have PageRank. A good way to do this is submit it to a paid directory, a sample list is at

http://www.xseo.com/directory-directory.htm

You will then have to wait a week or so before you proceed further.

Assuming you do have some PageRank, you need to navigate your site to see how the PageRank changes as you go around the site. If you have a PageRank of say 5/10 on the homepage but nothing on the next level of pages down, there may be a problem.

Whilst on the lower level pages, open another browser window and go to the Google search box. Type into the box

cache:

followed the URL of the page you are on into the search box, if the result from Google is:

Your search - cache:http://www.domain.co.uk/page.asp?p=679 - did not match any documents.

Googles crawler program is not reaching the page. There is a high likelihood that the platform or the navigation you are using is not search engine friendly.

If either of these tests result in failures it is worth getting the results checked to ensure there are no other influences such as stray "robots text", and to get a true diagnosis of the problem before appealing to your web designer to resolve.

More information is available for free on our SEO Tutorials page.

M.P