Note: This is a series of weekly articles designed for the novice to learn step-by-step how to improve their position on the search engines. Each step takes approximately 15 minutes, and are all easy to implement. If you, the reader, takes each step one by one each week, you’ll soon be getting better search engine results, and hopefully more qualified visitors to your website.

We all have goals. Someplace we want to be, and somehow, we’ll get there. Maybe you don’t know how you’re going to get there, but you need to get there nonetheless.

Search engine marketing, online marketing, or search engine optimization (SEO) all mean more or less the same thing. Hopefully everyone knows that they need to do it, but HOW do you do it? The end point is pretty nebulous, and the steps you need to take are probably even less clear to you. So you stall or get busy with other things, because the whole task seems so overwhelming and very daunting.

I understand the feeling. Truly.

So this is the first in a series of articles that will be published each week. If you take 15 minutes each week and do what I show you, by the end of the series, you’ll have made some serious of strides in getting to the “end point”, whatever that is.

Unfortunately, in any journey, if you don’t know where you are right now, you have no way of getting to your destination. If you don’t know what your assets and deficits are, you’re blind. So we have to start with the basics, and find out where our baseline is.

The very first step I EVER do when starting to think about improving a website, is put a stake in the sand so I know where the starting point is. You must do the same.

This first step is little, and an easy one. You need to know what the search engines like Google know about you because:

  • If your website hasn’t been indexed (read), then you have big problems, which we’ll discuss in a near-future article.
  • If your website has been indexed, but some of the pages are missing, then it’s a different, but slightly less of a problem. It’s still one you need to fix though.
  • If your website has been fully indexed, it’s highly likely that the fundamental setup of the pages has been incorrectly coded. 90% of the websites I look at (and I look at a LOT) have this problem.

I have people all the time who say, “Well I hired an SEO company, so I’m fully optimized.” Hm, many times it’s not correct. Maybe the SEO company is ripping them off or playing tricks with them. Until we look, you don’t really know.

The Steps You Need To Take

So how do we find out? Tell Google (or Bing) to tell you everything they know about you.

  1. Go to your Google (or Bing) search page (i.e. google.com or bing.com)
  2. Type in site:yourdomainname.com where yourdomainname.com is your website address (it can be .net, .org, .info, or whatever. Just enter your web address without the “www.”
  3. Hit [Enter]

It’s that simple. The search engines will come back and show you everything they know, like how many pages they read on your site (how many search results do they show at the top?).

They will show you what a searcher will see if any of your website page shows in the search engine results page (SERP). Go ahead and browse the page results and see what your searcher would see. Do the page titles (the top underlined line) say meaningful things to you, or do they say things like “Home Page” or “Welcome”? Do the page descriptions (the two black lines below the page title) say meaningful things to you? Or is it random, meaningless text? Or worse, are they all the same?

Go ahead and print out all the pages that Google displays. Next week, we’ll look at these results and talk about what to do about it. Most of the time, these all need fixing.

Why Didn’t I List Yahoo! To Search In?

No, that wasn’t an oversight. Bing and Yahoo! have merged. If you do the site: command on Yahoo!, it will return exactly the same results, so you just don’t need to do it there.

See you next week.