Starting out with a new website and building it effectively can be a tedious process. So many decisions to make and a solid plan that needs to take place in order for the entire piece to come together. One of the first things that you should consider prior to thinking about building a new website is your primary domain. It’s quite important that your website carries a user friendly domain and one that’s easily remembered by most users. There are several tools out there on the website including DomainsBot that can help you perform research on a new domain using variations of keywords. As I will explain later on in this post it’s quite important that you also consider having and Search Engine Friendly url to help with indexing, visibility, and crawlability in the eyes of a search engine robot.
Once your new website is up and running it’s important to keep in mind how search engines see your domain. You need to be aware at all times of the individual pages that search engine robots have indexed and are available to the general public for browsing. The reason I say this is because you want to make sure that content and your pages are being indexed by search engine spiders and available to visitors on the web. There are several tools and search queries that you can perform in major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing to find out which pages of your website have been indexed. A task that you should repeat on daily basis to ensure that you’re staying on top of your SEO activities and indexing of pages from your website.
Search Engines and Your Domain
When it comes to SEO performance and indexing of your website’s pages there are really only three major search engines that you should be concerned about – Google, Yahoo, & Bing. I’ve listed these in such order simply because of market share and traffic activity. Search Engine Optimization for your website should be primarily focused around Google’ algorithm if you’re serious about optimizing your domain and driving traffic from the natural results.
- Google – if you haven’t done so already I would suggest that you sign up for Google Webmaster Tools. There are various tools that you will find here that will help you manage your SEO performance of your domain – Sitemap, Search Queries, Performance, and More.
- Yahoo! – in order to track SEO performance of your domain you’ll need to sign up for the Yahoo! Site Explorer. This particular feature for webmaster from Yahoo! gives you the ability to submit your sitemap, monitor indexed pages, search queries, and much more.
- Bing – just like the other two search engines the Bing Webmaster Tools are the ideal solution for any webmaster and in general for tracking SEO performance of your domain. This particular feature has had a revamp in the last few months and now offers the same features such as Google & Yahoo and more.
Once you familiarize yourself with the various webmaster tools available from Google, Yahoo, and Bing you will learn various search queries that you can perform to track the indexing of individual pages from your domain by the search engine robots. A particular search query that you can use to find out the latest indexed pages of your domain is site:www.yourdomain.com By typing this particular query in the search box of the major search engines you will give provide with search results that show the latest indexed pages from your domain. It’s quite useful when you’re looking to track specific landing pages or even blog posts that you have recently wrote.