Interested in improving the visibility of your site on our engine? Hopefully this series of posts will help.

First up: answers to the two most frequently posed webmaster questions:

1) Why doesn’t my site appear (or why does it only partially appear) when I do a site search (i.e., typing “site: mysitename.com” in the search box)?

All or part of your site may be inaccessible to our robots. Try the following to improve your performance:

• Make sure that all pages are accessible by at least one static link.
• Place links to your most important content on every page of your site.
• Keeping in mind that certain dynamic pages can’t be accessed by our robots, move content as needed to static (or simply more accessible) pages (see “The Road to Better Site Indexing – Introduction and Episode 1”)
• Be sure the robots.txt file in your root directory is not blocking access to our crawler (use our robot checker form to test accessibility).
• Create a site map (see “The Road to Better Site Indexing: Episode 3, Sitemaps”) and submit it on our site.

2) Why doesn’t my site appear for a given keyword?

• First, check to see that the keyword is in our index for your site. Enter the keyword in the search field, along with “site:mysitename.com” to limit the search for that keyword to just your site (replacing “mysitename.com” with your domain name, of course). If it is not indexed, follow the steps for question 1 above.
• Refine the keywords in your site so they are as specific as possible. It could be the keyword you are checking is too general, and sites that larger, more relevant and/or more popular are ranking ahead of your site for that keyword.
• Verify that the content of your site corresponds well to the keyword. It’s not enough for a keyword to simply appear, it must be integrally related to the rest of the site content.

You’ll find further info on keyword relevancy in Search Engine Optimization (SEO): More Old-School Than You Think.”

And be careful out there! Stick to keeping your content fresh and relevant for your target audience. Reverting to tricks like hidden text, duplicate content, spam link exchanges or other such tactics to improve your ranking could get you banned from our index (for more info, see “The Road to Better Site Indexing – Episode 2”).

You’ll also find general webmaster tips in our site’s help pages.