Factors that can sabotage your optimization efforts

5 Optimize your web pages

Top 10 Optimizer tips:

3. Go through the panels and optimize the web page

5.4 Factors that can sabotage your optimization efforts

Even if your web pages are perfectly optimized, search engines might still not be able to index your web pages.

The reason for that is that some technical elements of your web server can cause problems.

5.4.1 Do errors in your HTML code keep search engine spiders away?

Many webmasters overlook a very important aspect of website promotion: the validity of the HTML code.

What is valid HTML code?

Most web pages are written in HTML. As for every language, HTML has its own grammar, vocabulary and syntax, and every document written in HTML is supposed to follow these rules.

Like any language, HTML is constantly changing. As HTML has become a relatively complex language, it's very easy to make mistakes. HTML code that is not following the official rules is called invalid HTML code.

Why is valid HTML code important?

Search engines have to parse the HTML code of your website to find the relevant content. If your HTML code contains errors, search engines might not be able to find everything on the page.

Search engine crawler programs obey the HTML standard. They can only index your website if it is compliant with the HTML standard. If there's a mistake in your web page code, they might stop crawling your website and they might lose what they've collected so far because of the error.

Although most major search engines can deal with minor errors in HTML code, a single missing bracket in your HTML code can be the reason if your web page cannot be found in search engines.

If you don't close some tags properly, or if some important tags are missing, search engines might ignore the complete content of that page.

How can you check the validity of your HTML code?

Select More Tools > HTML validator in IBP's main window. IBP will connect you to an official HTML validator that will check the code of your web pages.

Although not all HTML errors will cause problems for your search engine rankings, some of them can keep web spiders from indexing your web pages.

5.4.2 Check the status code that your server sends to search engines

Some websites cannot get high search engine rankings because the web server on which the web pages are hosted returns a wrong HTTP status code.

If you use the wrong status code, search engines won't index your site Normally, you web server should return a "200 OK" message when a search engine spider requests your web pages. Unfortunately, some web servers return error messages and other response codes.

That means that search engine spiders might not be able to index your web pages although your web pages look fine in your web browser.

IBP's search engine spider simulator checks the status code of your site IBP's Search Engine Spider Simulator is very easy to use. Select Tools > Search Engine Spider Simulator in IBP's main window to start the Search Engine Spider Simulator.

You can also select the search engine spider simulator in the Tools menu in IBP's main window.

Enter the URL of your website in the spider simulator and click the Next button:

In the second step, select the user agent with which IBP should visit the website.

The user agent is the name of a web browser or the name of a search engine spider.

You can enter any user name you want, or you can select one of the usernames in the popup menu.

If you select Google's spider in the list, IBP's Search Engine Spider Simulator will look like Google's spider to the website. That allows you to find out if a website returns different pages to Google than to normal web surfers (a technique with name cloaking).

When you click the Next button, IBP will visit the web page and analyze the code. If your web server returns an error message (or an error code), IBP will warn you and it will not analyze your website.

If the status code of your web page is okay, IBP will display the code that search engine spiders can see when they visit your page.

The buttons above the report preview allow you to view the report as a web page (HTML), PDF, text or Microsoft® Word® document (the latter is only

5.4.3 15 things that you can do when your website is not listed

First of all, you should make sure that IBP's Top 10 Optimizer can give the web page for which you want to get high rankings a 100% rating.

If you have a 100% rating, make sure that the following factors don't destroy your optimization work:

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