SEO: Look at the Big Picture of your Web Site
Jeff Walters March 23rd, 2008
I’d like to mention one “on-site” search engine optimization factor that is often overlooked: “uniqueness”. Google in particular, with it’s addition of supplemental pages is noticing, with a very keen eye, the uniqueness of the pages it indexes from your Web site. Not only should your page content be unique, but your page titles & META tags should also be considered. This is especially true if you have a dynamically built/generated Web site, such as a Web forum, online store or social networking site.
To start to analyze the uniqueness of your Web site, you should first find a program or develop your own program that will allow you to crawl your entire Web site identifying several page attributes along the way. There are several site crawler programs available for download that will do this for you. I chose to write my own PHP program using the Snoopy Class and several regular expression matches. The page attributes you want to capture are as follows:
- Page URL
- Page Title
- Meta Description
- Meta Keywords
- H1 Header
- H2 Header(s) (optional)
- Date Last Modified (optional)
Once you have this data, save it into a CSV/XLS format so you can easily look at it through a Spread Sheet program. Download the Open Office suite if you don’t already have it. Once you start looking at your Web site as a whole, you’ll start to notice where work needs to be done. Sort the data by Title and you should notice any duplicate titles. Make the necessary changes on your Web site so you have unique titles for each one of your pages. This sounds really simple, but you’ll soon realize that some programs/scripts are not written in a way that you can easily create unique titles. For example, if you own a Web store you may have to find a “hack” or “modification (mod)” to help make your titles unique. In some cases you’ll have to include the items name, category and even the item id in order to create a unique title. Listings also need to have unique titles. Once you examine your Titles, move on to your Meta Descriptions and Keywords. Again, they should be as unique as possible. I’m of the believe that it’s better to have no Meta descriptions, rather than having too many similar descriptions. The same logic applies to the Meta Keywords. If you can’t make them unique, then leave them blank. Their importance today is marginal.
Also note any pages that seem old or “stale” based on the date last modified. Revisit these pages and update them if needed. Having a Web site that is producing fresh new content is one that GoogleBot (Google’s Search Engine Bot) will most likely visit often. Keep your home page fresh, even if it’s only a few small textual changes every other day. You’ll soon notice that Google will visit your Web site more often.
Cheers,
Jeff Walters