search engine ranking

RainMaker

Thank you. This was very helpful. MOST of my pages are not indexed. A few random pages seem to be. How can I improve this? I have always been baffled by the aspect of "link popularity" when we have attained good rankings for pizza coupons and there is nothing special about the activity of our links. Also I see my home page WithCoupon.com is NOT directly indexed (only a couple pages in subdirectories are indexed).

This is very surprising to hear, as our rankings have always followed a round of submissions (done through a software program designed to assist in the process.)

Ok. possibly the software asks for this information in order to track rankings for certain search terms.

I'm still working my way through SEO Guy and I know his tutorial gets heavily into that.

Sure.

http://salespractice.com/ is not the same URL as http://www.salespractice.com/

Is this a problem for me and any suggestions on how to correct it?

Jeff Blackwell

Search engine spiders follow links to and from a page. If you have pages within your site that cannot be reached from other pages within your site (internal links) or from pages on another site (backlinks) then these pages are essentially invisible to the SE spiders.

This is the reason for good internal linking and the use of a "site map." These two (2) practices ensure that they SE spiders can smoothly navigate all of the pages within your site.

As for the two different versions... I would recommend having your host set up a 301 redirect so that the Non-WWW version redirects to the WWW version.

RainMaker

I am familiar with the term "web hosting" but am unsure whom you are referring to in this situation. Is this the domain registrar? I have a dedicated server and am paying a colocation fee to have it sit in a building with a bunch of other servers. They will manually reboot or load software disks into my drive when occasionally needed, but that is the extent of their involvement.

Jeff Blackwell

My post assumed "Shared Hosting."

Since you are the "host" it would be up to you to make the changes.

If you don't mind me asking, what prompted you to consider a "Dedicated Server?"

RainMaker

It was necessary because of the mapping software that is integrated into our sites. From pizzacouponsnow.com, if you want to pull up restaurants that deliver to your address, this can be done because we actually draw the pizza delivery maps into our software. While the site may appear very simplistic from the end-user point of view (that was intentional, by the way), the searching features are actually very complex and far superior to a simple zip code search.

Jeff Blackwell

That sounds like an interesting piece of software. Is it custom?

RainMaker

Yes. I'm an odd mix of high-tech and low-tech, huh?

Our problem is the orginal programmer has become "unavailable" now that he finished the big project and cashed our check He has moved on to other projects and can't be bothered with small follow up projects or answering any of our technical questions when they arise. Hence...Rainmaker of 1000 questions picking the brains of her new-found friends on salespractice.com.

(I try to offset my insatiable quest for knowledge by sharing what I can, as well. An you gotta admit...that action-filled avatar adds a lot of color to your pages--ha ha)

Jeff Blackwell

This has been my experience on more than one occassion with custom software.
Your presence is always welcome.

RainMaker

I found this site by search engine. After my initial visit I forgot all about the index page and continue to come straight to the forum page. Is the purpose of that page for SEO?

Jeff Blackwell

99% Yes.

There is more to that page than meets the eye. I have to admit that it could use a little help visually. It's on my "To-Do" list.