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View Full Version : How can I improve search engine rankings for a website with many pages?


stweb
03-10-2005, 05:05 AM
A website I'm working on http://www.positiveearth.org/bungalows/ has close to a hundred static html pages (time to think seriously about using dynamic pages). There's tons of html text on this site and many, many keywords. However, I find the rankings of my pages on Google are poor and I rarely get in the top ten on Yahoo. Crap sites with little information get better rankings.
How do search engines handle sites with many pages. For example, there may be many links pointing to the home page but, at least when a site is still young, you can't expect there are links pointing to every page in your site. So you might have a very relevant sub page with lots of the right keywords but no links pointing to it from external sites and a poor ranking? Do search engines consider links to the site as a whole or just to the particular page? Do search engines consider content of other pages related (linked) to a page or only look at the one page?
Can search engines help me or do I need to start asking for links from other relevant sites?
One strategy I could use is try and make my home page relevant to all kinds of searches but when people click on a search result they want to see a page with relevant information, not a page introducing a site and then have to find the relevant page within the site.

jmandrake
03-10-2005, 05:26 AM
Definitely work on finding link partners from relevant sites. That will go a long way to get spiders to visit and index your site. You might also get people to click on the links as well.

Things to consider:
- add a sitemap with links to all our pages, break up site map if there are too many links (google says about 100 but many successful sites have way beyond that number)
- you want to have regular text links to all your pages without having to use Javascript menus
- avoid using frames

Don't try to optimize your home page for all kinds of keywords. 2 or 3 max.

You might want to read: google's webmaster guidelines (http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html)