MAXIMIZE

SEM Action Checklist - Maximize

• Determine which Web pages drive your site ROI. These are typically product or service pages; however, articles, fact sheets and white papers may serve as important lead generation tools. Focus on these "top-tier" pages for your initial submission strategy. "Secondary" pages, like your "contact us" and "corporate information" pages are not typically as important.
  
  
• Check your indexing in each major engine before you start submitting. Remember, if a page is already indexed, resubmitting will not help your positions. Conversely, if a page is not listed, or if the engines "drop" a page from their index (which you would notice by checking indexing on a monthly or quarterly basis) you can resubmit that page again.
  
  
• Do you have software that will "submit your site daily to thousands of engines?" Delete it from your system. These programs will not help your indexing, and over submitting may downgrade your rankings (or get your site delisted from the engines). Hand-submitting your pages to targeted engines is a smarter strategy that completely avoids a spam penalty.
  
  
• Carefully follow each search engine's submission guidelines. In many cases, you'll only have to submit your home page. From there, the search engines will follow your links and index the rest of your site. However, if you have important pages that are not directly accessible through your navigation, you may want to consider submitting those pages, as well.
  
  
• Do you want to keep some sections of your site or individual pages from getting indexed? Implementing a robots.txt file to exclude spiders from certain directories or using META-robots tags on individual pages will keep spiders from recording your content.

Remember, to validate your robots.txt file before you upload it - if the code has errors, the search engines will not interpret it correctly.

Other SEM Action Checklists

SEM Action Checklist - Strategize
SEM Action Checklist - Analyze
SEM Action Checklist - Optimize

Back to Maximize