In part 1 of our post on Vanessa Fox’s Discovery Checklist, we looked at the Initial Accessibility Assessment. This time around we dig deeper and look at the on page related issues that may prevent your pages from being crawled and the tools you can use to determine what’s wrong.

• At least one internal link to every page
• Most important pages linked from home page
• Comprehensive HTML Sitemaps
• Google external links
• XML sitemaps
• Links work without Javascript, Flash, or images enabled

At least one internal link to every page

No page is an island. If you want folks to view it and the search engines to index it then you need to show them that it’s important by linking to it. The more important the page, the more links you should have to it from within your website.

One way to find out whether a page on your website has a link from another page is to use Yahoo’s Site Explorer. In the following example, you can see that JB HiIFi has over 4000 internal links to their main DVD page with many of the links coming from pages within the DVD category.

Most important pages linked from home page

For most websites the home page is the most valuable (due to the incoming links from other websites) and carries the most weight. If you want to highlight the importance of other pages within your website to the search engines then you need to include a link from the home page to the most important pages. The key here is to make it useful and add it to the content or navigation.

Note: Don’t go overboard or you will confuse and overload the visitor.

Also, avoid adding your links to the footer which can be easily identified by the search engines or worse out of sight as the search engines will pay less attention to it and even knock you back for over optimisation.

The approach below should be avoided:

Comprehensive HTML Sitemaps

For small sites (less than 100 pages) it’s fine to include all of the pages in a single sitemap. But if your pages are numbering in the hundreds, thousands or more then it s important to break your sitemaps into smaller more usable lists.

Good external links

The power of links cannot be underestimated. While a bad information architecture will prevent search engines from reaching your content, the content is nothing without inbound links from other websites. As the real currency of SEO, it’s vital to remember though, that not all links are created equally. What you strive for are links from partners, local businesses, government websites or news sites or what we in the industry call “Authority Sites.” Acquiring quality links over time will help raise the credibility of your content and improve your search rankings.

Yahoo’s Site Explorer can also help you identify inbound links to a particular page on your website from other sites as shown below for JB HiFi.

XML sitemaps

Well you can definitely get by without a XML sitemap, we still recommend one due to the additional information you can gleam from Google’s or Bing’s Webmaster Tools. Once your sitemap has been validated you can find pages that can’t be crawled or have duplicate Title and Meta Data Descriptions.

If possible, try to align the sitemaps with the category structure of your website. Doing so will allow you to collect unique information by category helping you to diagnosis future problems more easily.

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”UTF-9”?>
<sitemap xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.domain.com/mobile-phones.xml.gz</loc>
<lastmod>2009-23-06T10:20:30+00:00</lastmod>
</sitemap>
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.domain.com/broabband.xml.gz</loc>
<lastmod>2009-23-06</lastmod>
</sitemap>
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.domain.com/internet-access.xml.gz</loc>
<lastmod>2009-23-06</lastmod>
</sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

Links work without JavaScript, Flash, or images enabled

Search bots dislike technology that prevents them from getting at the content. While there is evidence that the bots are getting smarter at crawling Javascript and Flash, they still won’t give you much credit for the content sitting behind the links. One way to determine whether your links can be seen by the search engines is to check Google’s cache.

Start by conducting a search for your own pages in google: site:www.yourdomain.com.au.

Next, click the Cached link to the right of the display URL for one of the listings.

Finally, click the Text-only-version link in the top right corner of your browser window.

In the examples above, we can see that Google is picking up the links from the Javascript pull down menu which means that they can be followed.

You can also browse your website with images and Javascript turned off in your browser. Hopefully you will be able to see the same links you see on the real page. If not, then there’s a good chance the search engines can’t see them either and further work will be required.

Stay tuned, for more insight into Vanessa’s Discovery Checklist on:

• Page Accessibility
• Indexing Drop Diagnosis