More Tips about Assessing Your Website: Diagnose Your Problems

Today I’ve got more tips about ways to better the traffic to your website by pinpointing the exact issues that are hampering your site.

Again, it’s all about self-diagnosis and understanding your website’s problems. Without knowing the root of the problem, it’s impossible to fix it. Is your website brand new? Is your content informative and interesting enough? Have you broken any of the ethical SEO commandments? You may have to take a step back from your website to truly observe the problems that you’re having. Most importantly though, make sure you actually have a problem before you start changing your website and fixing things. Yes, that fact should be an obvious one, but you will probably be tempted to believe that a decrease in your overall indexed pages means that you have a serious problem. However, Google may have just de-indexed any ineffective or duplicated pages that you might have. If your search traffic hasn’t dropped off, chances are you don’t have a significant search problem. Remember, sometimes change can be good. If you’re still convinced that there is a problem with your website, these tips should help direct you towards any traffic dilemmas that you’re facing.

* Crawl efficiency – it’s one of the keys to getting on the good sign of your friendly search engine crawlers. You’ve got to let them know which pages are the most important for crawling purposes. You want the engines spending their time on the pages that are important to your site rather than the non-productive error and registration pages that take away from your valuable content.

* Be sure to create comprehensive sitemaps for each of your categories by creating a sitemap index file that links your multiple sitemaps and submitting it to Google Webmaster Central. This will give you great insight into how well Google is crawling all of the different aspects of your site. You also gain access to all of the tools and graphs in Webmaster Central sitemap reports. This way you can see how much and which areas of your content is being crawled and how much of that content is being indexed. For example, you might notice that Google is crawling all of your content in one category, but indexing only 25% of it. This will give you a great place to start trying to figure out why.