When submitting a site to Google’s spider-based search engine, there are many site elements you should avoid because they can cause problems and diminish your rankings. Site elements such as query strings in your URL, using frames, using cookies, broken links, user input pages, redirected pages, graphic-intensive pages and decreasing keyword keyword weight by including large amounts of code cause problems with the spidering process. Here are elements you should avoid:

Using Frames

Google indexes each element of a frame separately. For this reason, if the content of one element of your frame is indexed, the user will only see that part of the frame and not the entire page. If is desirable to avoid frames altogether. However, if you must use frames, either place a NO FRAMES tag in your code or create a non-frame version of each page to submit to Google. The NO FRAME tag tells the Google spider to avoid indexing the frame and thereby get around the problem of frames. By submitting the non-frames version of a page, you also avoid only displaying part of the page to an Google user.

Requiring Cookies

Google spidering will affect sites attempting to set cookies. Many sites use cookies to track information about their users. Cookies themselves pose no problems to Google; however, the Google spider will not accept cookies as it crawls your site. Therefore, if a cookie must be accepted before the page loads, the spider will not crawl that page or any pages below it in your site. In short, if your determine that you want to serve cookies, make certain that your pages will load without the cookie being accepted or Google will not be able to fully crawl your site.

Broken Links

Broken links provide two problems to Google. Fundamentally, a broken link prevents the spider from crawling parts of your site and indexing that content. Also, a number of broken links is an indication of how credible the site is. For example, if your site has 20 “indexable” pages, but half of them contain broken links, Google will most likely determine that your site is not a valuable resource and will not thoroughly index it. As a result, it is important to make sure you have no broken links.

Redirection

Redirects are not a problem here. Instead of penalizing sites that have redirects, Google follows the links and indexes the page it finds.

Image Maps

Since Google performs deep crawls, image maps would pose a problem here. Search engine spiders do not have the luxury of clicking a link from your image map; they cannot index any pages that are linked to you site by an image map. If you do have an image map, you may want to consider including text-based hyperlinks to those pages as well. If you like, you can include them on the bottom of your page. If will provide the spider a pathway for finding those pages.

The most important factor that would cause a problem in Google would be to have no other sites within the Google index that link to your site. Link popularity is very important in Google’s ranking system, and to not have any relevant links would return a very poor ranking for your Web site.

Author Bio: Upshur Creative builds custom ecommerce websites with drop shipping. All websites are pre-stocked with brand name products from trusted suppliers. Visit UpshurCreative.com at: Home Based Business Opportunity

I had to cut things short yesterday because I was traveling to Pontefract to stay with my daughter. I’m feeling great today because I don’t see Fran and my grandchildren often enough and when I do I always feel refreshed.

It was a special occasion yesterday, my 3 year old granddaughter Isabella was dancing on the stage at a concert organised by her dance school. My what a lot of cute there was and I especially enjoyed watching Izzy dance. She did really well remembering the 3 dances that she performed with a group of other children around her age. Talk about proud gran!

Anyway now that I’ve returned relaxed and happy I feel raring to go and can spend more time on this blog. I’m mentioning this because I feel that it’s important to take quality time away from a business internet or otherwise else it can take over your life.

As today is Sunday it was easy enough to check the articles submitted to my directories. There are never as many submitted at the weekends which gives me more quality time with my websites and blogs, but I don’t have as much free time during the week so it’s best to make the most of it.

I’ve mentioned article directories before and they are actually an excellent free way to get traffic called Article Marketing. There will be more about Article Marketing on another day, when I start to go through that process.

Traffic

I said yesterday that I would give you a quick peak at statistics for visitors, it’s very early days so I wouldn’t set too much store in the results but traffic has already increased. This domain had been averaging 17 unique visitors a month and my first target was to double that within the first week and get 17 unique visitors a day by the end of the first month. During the last 3 days of January there were 47 unique visitors so I have already beaten my first target with the steps that I have taken. Those are results from my site cpanel stats.

When I set this blog up I also set up an account for it with Google Analytics. You can get very detailed statistics there, but I’m going to wait until my first month is up before I check them properly.

Where Did The Traffic Come From?

5 Visitors came in through an advert that I posted to a free advertising blog. 2 from keyphrase searches that found articles,  1 a keyword search for a product sales page that was the main page of the site previously – still there but not the home page, 8 click throughs from some of my other websites and the rest came via Twitter and the Tweet Me plug in that I added.

What On Earth Is Twitter?

My thought when I first encountered Twitter last year. Twitter is a social bookmarking site where you can pick up followers who are interested in what you are doing. According to Tweeters who rave about it on forums Twitter is currently one of the best ways to get traffic to your sites and blogs. Although I joined Twitter over a year ago I haven’t really used it until I started this blog. So I am also learning as I progress.

When I added the Tweet Me plug in it automatically posted excerpts of the new blog posts to my profile on Twitter. Obviously several people were interested enough to come and take a look and one of them was interested enough to become a follower yesterday.

Apparently how Twitter works for Internet marketers is that you build up a following and then every now and then post details of something that you are trying to sell, a special offer or something new to your followers, but it works better if you have at least 10 fresh blog posts in between ads.

Obviously you would have to build up quite a following to make sales, but you can do that by searching for members in your niche and following them. They are notified and some reciprocate. I haven’t got time for that so for now I’ll settle for new content attracting followers, or indeed those who are adding me because they want to sell me something. It will be interesting to see how many followers I can attract this way.

Opzioni Sociable

No I don’t speak Italian, well not words that you’d want to know! Optzioni Sociable is a new plug in which I added today. If you look at the bottom of the posts you will see a bunch of pretty icons underneath the heading Share and Enjoy. These are links to social bookmarking sites.

This is a powerful tool that can help to get traffic to your sites and blogs, help your posts along in Google rankings and provide quality backlinks. Optzioni Sociable gives you a choice of over 100 social bookmarking sites to link to, but I chose the 30 I believe to be the most popular and effective. I could be wrong and I may add more or remove some later, but at least I have some control over them.

What Is Social Bookmarking?

Basically when you socially bookmark a site or article you are creating linkbacks on websites that are popular and can help your sites and blogs gain popularity. You can socially bookmark your own sites, blogs and articles and you can use the bookmarking icons when you see something that you like on other websites and blogs.

It all works in a similar way to Twitter and the more times your content is socially bookmarked the better it is for you. I have icons to some of my favourite social bookmarking sites set up in my browser, so I generally use those whenever I want to give my content a boost for traffic, or indeed see something that I like on somebody elses website or blog.

My favourites are Dig, StumbleUpon, Facebook and Myspace, but with Facebook I’m not always comfortable with submitting Internet Marketing material to my profile apart from when I launch a new website. That is because half of my friends on Facebook are personal friends and relatives who are not interested in Internet marketing and I don’t want to annoy them by having my updates automatically posted to their profiles. I guess the best way around that is to start a group of those interested in Internet marketing and submit to that.

And The Rest

I added some more content and will continue to do so daily. The articles are all being selected to especially fit in with the theme of this blog. In time I should be able to build up a lot of information about free tools and resources for Internet Marketers and where to find them. Hopefully you will help me in this quest by recommending good ones in comments.

I also set up pinging to ping-o-matic which is  is a service to update different search engines and let them know that your blog has updated. I probably should have done that on day 1 but better late than never.