The Four C’s of Professional SEO for your Dental Practice Website – Part 2 – Crawlability

This is the second part of a four part series of posts that reveals what professional SEO’s know about search engine marketing and you could easily learn. You can drive more patients to your dental practice if you understand the Four C’s of SEO. You or your office assistant could apply these strategies about an hour a day and see major improvement in the patients you are receiving from your dental website.

The first post about the importance of SEO Content is here and I recommend that you read it first.

Crawlability

The second of the Four C’s is Crawlability. In the previous post we discussed that if you have no content for the search engines to index you will have zero probability of being returned as a search result. The same is true for Crawlability. If you are creating “speedbumps” or “walls” for the search engines to navigate over or through to index your content, you are increasing the probability that search engines will not index your site and thus you will have zero probability of being returned as a search result.

Here are some things to avoid:

Frames
A website that is built in frames cannot be indexed by a search engine. You can see a great example of a site that is in frames here: Roger Washington Dentistry. When you visit the site you may think that it looks fairly normal. But to a search engine it does not. Try clicking on the “Office Information” link on the left of Dr. Washingtons site. You will notice that the URL does not change from rogerwashington.com to rogerwashington.com/officeinformation.

This is because all of the content for this site is being pulled from a frameset. If your site is in frames, you have erected a wall for the search engines and they are not able to climb it.

Remedy: If your site is in frames, this is a relatively easy redesign procedure. It should be fairly cheap and painless to get your content out of frames.

Flash

Although Google has lately released information claiming that they can now index Flash content, it is not a good idea to have your ENTIRE site built from Flash. This is a speedbump and if you are having trouble getting your site indexed, this could be the reason.

In addition, if a visitor comes to your site and does not have Flash installed on their machine they will not be able to view your content.

Remedy: Consider a redesign that will create an HTML version of your site to be displayed if someone (like a search engine spider) visits your site and doesn’t have Flash installed.

Robots.txt File
The robots.txt file is a file on your site that a search engine will visit when it hits your site (if one is present.) Don’t be afraid of the technical name. The “Robots file” is simply a place that a search engine spider visits to determine if there are any pages on your website that you DO NOT want the search engine to put in it’s index.

For an example visit the “Robots File” on my website: www.thesemfirm.com/robots.txt

Here is what you find:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

The first line says (in code) “Attention All Search Engine Spiders”
The second line says (in code) “Feel free to visit and index any page on this site”

If your robots.txt file says:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

you are saying (in code):

“Attention all Search Engine Spiders (first line), Go Away! (second line)”

The robots.txt file can get tricky if the person who created your website wanted to exclude many different files from being indexed for any reason. If you need help interpreting your “Robots file” contact me and I will be happy to help.

Remedy:  If your robots.txt file is not allowing search engines to index your site, change it to reflect what I have in mine.

XML Sitemap
The three reasons above are the most common problems that we encounter with Crawlability.  The best way to determine if you site is being crawled is to follow the instructions in this 2 minute video about verifying that you are in Google and Yahoo’s index.

If you have determined that your website is crawlable, you should move on to improving that crawlability by adding an XML Sitemap. Don’t be afraid of the word XML, I am going to give you a link to a free tool that will create this file for you in the XML programming language. You won’t ever need to know or care what XML means. :)

An XML Sitemap is a road map for the search engine to find all of the pages on your site quickly and easily. Remember that the search engines have a huge job to do. They have to index billions of pages on the Internet and adding an XML Sitemap will:

- Increase the depth that they crawl your site
- Increase the frequency that they crawly your site

These are good things. Get your free XML Sitemap by using this tool and let me know if you have any problems.

Upload your sitemap to your website at the same level (directory) that your home page is located.

If your trying to figure out whether your site is indexed at all and thus may be having crawlability issues, have a look at this video.

Let me know if you have questions by contacting me here.

UPDATE: The third of the Four C’s concerning links to your dental website is located here.

January 25, 2009    Posted in: Four C's of SEO

3 Responses

  1. The Four C’s of Professional SEO for your Dental Practice Website - Part 1 | The SEM Firm - January 25, 2009

    [...] The Four C’s of Professional SEO for your Dental Practice Website – Part 2 – Crawlability [...]

  2. The Four C’s of Professional SEO for your Dental Practice Website - Part 3 - Connection | The SEM Firm - February 11, 2009

    [...] This is the third of the Four C’s of Professional SEO.  If you have not read the other posts I would encourage you to start from the beginning by reading the first two C’s — Content and Crawlability. [...]

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