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12.27.07
Five Website Obstacles
 By
Matt Bailey
From years of troubleshooting websites for companies, I have consistently run up against the same problems.
The size of the company, or the website for that matter, has very little to do with these problems, however I usually find that larger companies have these problems at unusually higher rates than smaller companies.
Each of these problems can kill your internet marketing campaign in the search engines. They have critical importance in allowing the search engines to properly download your website to their servers and then analyze all of the information in your webpage's code. Having your website downloaded correctly to the search engines is the first step in organic search marketing, and these issues are at the foundation of the organic strategy.
Web Programming for Marketers
A better title for this might be IT for Marketers, as both groups need to work together for a successful strategy. As much as IT needs to understand the goals of the marketing campaign, marketing needs to understand the many details and constraints of the IT group.
1. Robots.txt File
This is the first place that I look for problems in a website. This is such a simple file, and usually webmasters are the primary people that deal with this file. In larger organizations, it can be years before anyone checks this file for accuracy, or even to verify that it exists.
The purpose of the robots.txt file is explained in a past article, and it is a critical file for the search engines, as they request this file before downloading the pages of your website. If they request it, there should be a file there. But be careful. One misplaced forward slash can make your site invisible in the search engines.
2. Homepage Redirects
Redirects are many times the product of a content management system. You can spot this if you've ever typed in the domain of a website, www.domain.com, and the page that you end up on is www.domain.com/base/index.com (or something similar), a few levels deep.
Here is what happened:
The root level page is what you requested: www.domain.com. However, a redirect forwards the user to the actual content page, which is no longer on the root level, but in a subfolder (/base/).
A redirect is like a forwarding address. When you move to a new house, you fill out a mail forwarding slip to notify the post office that you've moved. A redirect is the same thing. The redirect notifies the person (or search engine) who requested the page that the page is in a new location, and send them there.
Continue reading this article.
About
the Author:
Matt Bailey is the founder of SiteLogic, a website marketing consulting
company. Matt has been in the SEO and website marketing industry since
1996, and instructing others how to do so since 1999. Matt is a regular
speaker for the Search Engine Strategies Conferences, both in the US and
International Shows, the Direct Marketing Association and the American
Advertising Federation.
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