Failure to make sites that are search engine friendly

Web masters spend a great deal of time carefully optimising their home page, tweaking the keyword density, the meta tags, making sure that they have all of the so-called proper on page factors just right and there it stops. This is a serious mistake. One of your primary goals is to ensure that if you're selling a product, you're able to have your site found when people are looking for that product. That means all of your website, not just the first page.

One of the most common mistakes is optimising the home page for too many keywords. Web designers think they can cause their home page to be ranked well for all of their products or keyword phrases. In the real world, that rarely happens. So, what's the key to having your site rank well for a variety of different search terms? The key is to make your site fully accessible to a search engine spider. Google and Yahoo! rank pages - not sites which means that any page in your web site has the ability to rank well.

A home page will usually rank better for a given keyword than an interior page, but if you structure your site the correct way, any interior page of your site has the opportunity to rank for a very specific keyword or keyword phrase. That's why you need to treat each page as a Search Engine Optimisation Opportunity.

Make sure you spend time optimising every page in your site. If you're having trouble ranking for a particular keyword, write an article or newsletter that uses that keyword as the subject, throw it onto your site and make sure that page can be easily crawled by compiling a site map. You need to make sure that all of the pages in your web site are able to be accessed from the home page. Most of the time, a Search Engine Spider will enter your site from your home page. There, it will begin to crawl through your site via the links it finds on the home page. If one of your interior pages can't be accessed from the home page, it could take a long time for the spider to find that page. This is why home pages with logo's spinning graphics and wonderful looking moving images are a waste of time if there's nothing on there to show the search engines how to reach the rest of your site's pages.

You simply can't cause your home page to rank well for more than 2 or 3 specific keyword or keyword phrases. In order to place well in the rankings for a number of different terms, you need to rely on other pages in your site that are optimised (both on page and off) for those alternative keywords. The best way to ensure that those pages have a chance at finding their way onto the first pages in Google or Yahoo is make sure that your site is structured so that a spider can find every page in your site from links on the home page.

To quickly check and see how many pages of your site have been indexed by Google, go to the normal Google search box and search as follows. Type in site:yourdomain.com (replacing "yourdomain.com" with the actual web address of your web site). This will tell you at a glance not only how many of your pages have been crawled by Google, but more importantly, it shows you how many pages have been actually indexed. It's definitely not just about the home page of your web site - but every single page.