Smart Traffic SEO Tip #35 – How to Guide Search Engines to Find your Most Important Pages
Some pages get indexed and are crawled easily by search engines depending on how your website’s navigational links are structured. For your most important pages, they should not be hard to find. But how would Search engines know if they are the most important ones or not? To do this, consider the following tips below:
1. Your most important pages should be linked to directly from the home page. The more important the page, the fewer the clicks should be to reach it.
2. Consider Internal Linking especially for those pages that you not only you want to get indexed but also to rank. Link to these pages from your sitewide navigation.
3. For your navigational links try using the keyword in the link text if appropriate. This will also increase the relevance of those pages with regards to their topic.
4. For those unimportant pages for search engine rankings place nofollow on them. This will help crawlers focusing only the most important pages.
5. Irrelevant or Duplicate pages should be blocked from robots (make use of your robots.txt file or meta noindex tag) or by the canonical tag. This would not only prevent duplicate content issues but also is a way of getting more attention from crawlers directly to the important ones. See SEO Tip #12 for more info on dealing with duplicate pages
6. Fix any existing 404 pages. Check if there are old pages that still have internal links pointing to that page. 301 redirect these to the new version which help pass over some of the link weight they may have picked up.
7. Create an XML sitemap with your most important pages listed and submit it through GWT – more info on XML sitemaps can be found in our SEO Tips #23 and #24
