You Have More Web Sites Than You Think
You Have: The Importance of Deep Submission
By Donald Nelson
If I ask you how many web sites
do you have? You may say “One, yes it is www.mycompany.com
“ or “two” in case you have a second organization or
company. When I first began promoting my web sites I was, like
most people, only thinking in terms of one web address, the
url of my main page. And
I thought that this main page was a difficult one to promote
because it was the index page of a magazine that covered a
wide variety of fields (environment, arts, science, politics,
spirituality, etc). How could I optimize a page for so many
keywords, which market could I focus on?
It was only after discussing
the subject with another web master, who had a similar site,
that I learned that the diversity of all the inner pages of my
site was a huge asset. Each of these pages was like a
mini-website, and capable of attracting a multitude of
visitors using a variety of keywords. Part of my ignorance at
that point was due to a lack of accurate tracking data. I had
a simple tracker on the main page that told how many visits
that page was getting, but I had no idea of what was happening
deeper inside the site. Then I was able to get access to the
raw access logs of the site and using a log analysis tool I
began to see the real picture of what was happening.
I saw that the main page was
getting one third of the total traffic of the site. I found
out that one article, “The Causes of Tropical
Deforestation” was a big hit and consistently getting a lot
of traffic. Other articles were also quite popular, but
covering completely different subjects.
It was then that I realized that I had not one web
site, but more than 100 web sites.
What does all this mean in
terms of design, optimization and submission?
It means that one has to realize that people may well
enter your site through the “side door” or the “back
door” and you have to prepare accordingly.
For design, it means that the
structure of your pages and navigation system should invite
the people who enter from the inner pages, to make it to your
important pages (about us, main page, or your order page!).
For optimization it means that you should take more care about
the placing of keywords, description and title tags on all the
pages. Have you
ever seen websites where the blue line at the top of the
browser is showing the title of the page to be “New Page”?
Even very good designers become a little bit sloppy on the
inner pages, and though they do usually manage to put a proper
page title on those pages, they seldom take the trouble to
write separate meta tags for the keywords and descriptions.
But as I learned, these pages are an asset and can be
optimized and promoted to gain more traffic.
The first thing that I did was
to redesign my navigation system to take advantage of this
traffic and make sure that those who entered through the back
door would visit the important departments of the magazine. I
also put a newsletter sign-up form on all the inner pages, and
to this day these pages are bringing in a steady stream of
subscribers to the magazine’s e-mail bulletin. The next
thing I did was to make sure that the inner pages had proper
meta tags, and finally I did a deep submission of the whole
site.
What is a deep submission
and why is it necessary? When you submit the main page of your
site to a search engine, the search engine sends a
“spider” to look at your page and put the data on that
page in the search engines index. Sometimes the spider will
follow the links on your main page and also pick up some of
the inner pages (Google, for example is very good at this) but
sometimes they don’t go deep enough into the site and only
one or two of your pages are indexed. To get the other pages
indexed you have to submit them all separately, just as if
they were other web sites. However, if you have 100 pages you
can’t submit them on the same day to one search engine. That
would be regarded as spamming. If you submit one url per day
per search engine you will not get into any problems.
So, think about your site more
deeply. Your inner pages are mini-websites and if prepared and
promoted properly they could increase your traffic and your
sales dramatically.
Donald Nelson is a web
developer, editor and social worker. He has been promoting web
sites since 1995 and now runs A1-Optimization (http://www.a1-optimization.com)
a company that provides low-cost search engine optimization
and submission services. He can be reached at support@a1-optimization.com
© Copyright 2002, Donald Nelson, all rights
reserved.
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