Auditing Your Website's Internal Links - Part 2

link-to-contentIn Part 1 I wrote about using javascript in a way that obscures and hides internal links on your website and makes them hard for search engine robots to crawl. However, it is also important that the unique text on your web page not be trapped inside images or flash. Nor should your unique web page content be “nonexistent” without JavaScript and CSS enabled. Here are some tips on how to improve your pages for better crawling and better ranking in the search engine results.

OK, so part 2 is not so much about links. Its more about the content the internal links on your website are pointing to. Which is very important.

Unique Webpage Content

The important point to remember here is… UNIQUE CONTENT. Sorry for screaming but if the only crawlable text on your web page is found in your navigational headers or your footers then every page on your web site will send a very similar message to the search engine robots about your site’ content.

It may seem obvious but I will mentioned it anyway… if the search engine robots cannot read the text on your page then your page will be indexed as if it were empty. An empty page is not good for attracting organic search traffic through keywords!

Believe me... empty = no rank = no traffic!

If you have a very dynamic, graphic website you should take a look at your site from the viewpoint of a search robot. 

Unique webpage content is important for organic search

You hear a lot about having links leading to your web pages (from within and without). And search engine spiders use these links to crawl your site and index pages. And having targeted, keyword-rich anchor text for those links is also important. But, the presence of unique body content on the page is also an essential part of optimizing your pages for organic search. Afterall that's what the links are pointing to. A link that says cars and points to dentists is a lame link and the search engines rank accordingly. Likewise a link that says cars and leads to a site with zero readable content is just as lame and is ranked poorly as wellm

Audit for unreadable web page content

Find a spider simulator program and have it crawl your web pages. Don’t worry, its very easy. When you look at the results you might be surprised by what you see.

Try: http://www.feedthebot.com/tools/spider/index.php

It’s free.... I use it for a quick lookie

Pay attention to the section labeled “Text the spider sees”. If you don’t see much content other than links and tags then the spiders and robots that crawl your web pages cannot  see much there either.

You will be rewarded and punished accordingly!

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