A fundamental to ensuring your web site appears in the search engine listings is making sure that search engine spiders can successfully crawl your web site. After all, if the spider can't reach your pages, then the search engine can't include them in their search listings.
Unfortunately many web sites use technologies or architectures that make them hostile to search engine spiders. A search engine spider is really just an automated web browser that must interpret your page's underlying HTML code, just like a regular browser does.
But search engine spiders are surprisingly unsophisticated web browsers. The most advanced spiders are arguably the equivalent of a version 2.0 web browser. That means the spider can't understand many web technologies and can't read parts of your web page. That's especially damaging if those parts include some or all of your page's links. If a spider can't read your links, then it won't crawl your site.
As a search engine marketing consultant, I'm often asked to evaluate new web sites soon after their launch. Search engine optimization is often neglected during the design process, when designers are focused on navigation, usability, and branding. As a result, many sites launch with built-in problems, and it's much harder to correct these issues once the site is complete.
Yet often its only when their site fails to appear in the search engine listings that many companies call in an SEO.
That's a shame, because for small businesses, search engines are by far the most important source of traffic. Fully 85% of Internet users find sites through search engines. A web site that isn't friendly to search engines, its value is greatly reduced.
In this article, I'll give an overview of the issues that can keep a search engine spider from indexing your site. This list is by no means exhaustive, but it will highlight the most common issues that will keep spiders from crawling your pages.
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