Beware of the Following “Speed Bumps”:

• URLs with 2+ dynamic parameters; i.e. http://www.url.com/page.php?id=4&CK=34rr&User=%Tom% (spiders may be reluctant to crawl complex URLs like this because they often result in errors with non-human visitors)
• Pages with more than 100 unique links to other pages on the site (spiders may not follow each one)
• Pages buried more than 3 clicks/links from the home page of a website (unless there are many other external links pointing to the site, spiders will often ignore deep pages)
• Pages requiring a “Session ID” or Cookie to enable navigation (spiders may not be able to retain these elements as a browser user can)
• Pages that are split into “frames” can hinder crawling and cause confusion about which pages to rank in the results.

Beware of the Following “Walls”:

• Pages accessible only via a select form and submit button
• Pages requiring a drop down menu (HTML attribute) to access them
• Documents accessible only via a search box
• Documents blocked purposefully (via a robot meta tag or robots.txt file)
• Pages requiring a login
• Pages that re-direct before showing content (search engines call this cloaking or bait-and-switch and may actually ban sites that use this tactic)

In order to avoid the above pitfalls and ensure that your website’s contents are fully crawlable, be sure to provide direct, HTML links to each page you want the search engine spiders to index. Remember to make every page of your site accessible from the home page, since the home page is usually the place spiders begin their crawl. It’s also a good idea to add a sitemap to your website in order to increase its navigation.

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This article was written by David Montalvo, Senior SEO and Director of Business Development at Active Web Group.

Both methods seek to attract visitors to your site by appearing to a target audience searching for relevant keywords. However, statistics show that users will more often than not click on the site that appears to rank highly due to organic search results – sites that appears to contain the most direct relevance to a keyword search. Pay-Per-Click should not be discredited; utilizing both Pay-Per-Click and Pay-Per-Ranking will provide optimal exposure and an advantage over competitive sites.

Integrating your website with advanced SEO will help a website receive achieve high search engine rankings and allows a small business to compete with major international corporations. Of course, simply employing someone well-versed in SEO to rewrite your website content will not have you seeing positive results overnight. In competitive markets, it may be weeks or even years before your search engine ranking rises to a visible level.

This is because SEO is only one part of a Pay-Per-Ranking marketing campaign. Building microsites, creating backlinks, and focusing on the most relevant search keywords and keyphrases are all pertinent factors. This is especially true when attempting to compete in a popular niche dominated by larger corporations or businesses with several years more experience and a larger customer base.

The SEO professionals at Active Web Group possess years of knowledge and expertise in advanced web marketing tools and methods, and can craft the content of your website to have you rank alongside or higher than the competition and level the playing field. Additionally, organic search rankings resulting from well-written SEO as part of a Pay-Per-Ranking service are often long lasting and serve to secure a strong web presence.

Active Web Group’s Pay-Per-Ranking© service includes a complete consultation, and the SEO experts will work with you to properly assess your business priorities, compose a comprehensive list of targeted search terms, and utilize only proven, ethical SEO techniques to help you achieve the ranking you desire.

Additionally, organic search rankings resulting from well-written SEO as part of a Pay-Per-Ranking service are often long-lasting and serve to secure a strong web presence.

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While often very complex in their calculations and data processing, the critical operations performed by the major search engines in order to rank websites isn’t as lengthy as one might think. The processes they use to provide relevant results when a web search is undergone can best be described in the following four steps.

1. Send out the Web Crawlers
   Search engines use invisible “bots” or “spiders,” which are really programs or automated scripts, that browse (or “crawl”) the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Search engines use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data. This type of technology is necessary because the rate at which people create new Internet documents greatly exceeds any manual indexing capacity. In fact, an estimated 20 billion web pages exist, and search engines have crawled about half of them.
2. Index the Pages
   After a spider crawls a web page, it makes a copy of it and adds it to its database. This process is known as indexing. With so many search queries submitted each minute, it is very important that search engines are steadfast in their index management so that they can search and sort billions of documents in fractions of a second.
3. Process Queries
   Search engines process hundreds of millions of search queries every day. When someone keys in a search term and clicks “Search,” the engine retrieves from its index all of the documents that match the query. It determines a match by finding the same terms or phrase entered into the search bar. Entering a multi-word phrase by itself can return literally millions of results, but entering that same phrase in quotes can greatly narrow the results, giving the user a more accurate listing of websites that relate to their particular search.
4. Rank Pages
   A very closely guarded mathematical equation, called an algorithm, is employed by each search engine to determine how to sort and rank search query results. This algorithm allows the engine to rank the most relevant web pages first, and the rest in descending order of importance to the user.

What You Can Do for Your Website: Avoid Speed Bumps & Walls

You may not know it, but you could be hindering or preventing your website from being crawled by search engine spiders. As spiders crawl the web, they rely on the architecture of hyperlinks to find new web pages and revisit those that may have changed. Complex links and deep site structures with little unique content may act as “speed bumps” in the process by slowing down the spiders. Even worse, data that cannot be accessed by web crawlers are really like “walls” in that they completely prevent your web pages from being ranked.

Beware of the Following “Speed Bumps”:

• URLs with 2+ dynamic parameters; i.e. http://www.url.com/page.php?id=4&CK=34rr&User=%Tom% (spiders may be reluctant to crawl complex URLs like this because they often result in errors with non-human visitors)
• Pages with more than 100 unique links to other pages on the site (spiders may not follow each one)
• Pages buried more than 3 clicks/links from the home page of a website (unless there are many other external links pointing to the site, spiders will often ignore deep pages)
• Pages requiring a “Session ID” or Cookie to enable navigation (spiders may not be able to retain these elements as a browser user can)
• Pages that are split into “frames” can hinder crawling and cause confusion about which pages to rank in the results.

Beware of the Following “Walls”:

• Pages accessible only via a select form and submit button
• Pages requiring a drop down menu (HTML attribute) to access them
• Documents accessible only via a search box
• Documents blocked purposefully (via a robot meta tag or robots.txt file)
• Pages requiring a login
• Pages that re-direct before showing content (search engines call this cloaking or bait-and-switch and may actually ban sites that use this tactic)

In order to avoid the above pitfalls and ensure that your website’s contents are fully crawlable, be sure to provide direct, HTML links to each page you want the search engine spiders to index. Remember to make every page of your site accessible from the home page, since the home page is usually the place spiders begin their crawl. It’s also a good idea to add a sitemap to your website in order to increase its navigation.