How to think like a search engine – Part 1
by Michael - June 18th, 2008 2:14 am
This is the first in a regular series of quick tips to alter your thinking with regard to search engines. In fact, the goal is to learn to think like the search engines themselves, since being able to think like they operate will give you a decided advantage in the ever-present battle for the online consumer.
Today’s tip is so obvious that you have have overlooked it and if you have, your ecommerce website may be suffering in the search engine ratings as a result. For the purposes of this post, I am assuming that for your site you are using a template-based program to administer your website, such as WordPress (which I use to write and manage this blog).
While template-based programs make administration a breeze, they can also be the biggest cause of what is commonly called duplicate content death.ÂÂ
The good thing about these programs is also their biggest problem. Templates allow your site to have a consistent look and feel, but that means that every page (or at least many of them) have a great deal of the same coding, with the only difference being in the content that varies from page to page.
When a search engine spider scans your site, it looks for pages that are so similar that they are deemed unnecessary to index. When that happens – you guessed it – you don’t get listed.
What can you do? The answer is simple, really.
It takes a bit of doing on your part, but to start you need to copy and paste the template itself (deleting the variable content) into a program that will allow for word count (such as Microsoft Word). Once you have a word count for the template itself, you need to remember that number.
On every page on which you have content (which should be every page on your site), the word count of your actual content must be higher than the word count of the template, or the search engine spiders are going to drop you like a hot potato.
Have a problem getting high rankings? Give this simple tip a try for your whole site, and in no time your rankings will improve tremendously!
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