Topic: SEO: home vs. internal pages

I've got a recently-launched site which is just now starting to show in search engines. In MSN's search engine, it shows up in the results of some targetted search terms, but it's one particularly wordy page -- history.php -- that is getting indexed.

Anyone know a handy way of telling web robots to report the home page (index.php) if they like what they see on history.php -- which is only one click down? I know all about using robots.txt to tell search engines to go home, but I don't know how to get more fine-grained control, or even if I can.

Failing that, I guess my alternative would be to figure out what the robots like about history.php, and put even more of it on the home page. By the way, I understand that web searchers want to cut to the chase and go straight to the page with their information on it, but the search term is "milwaukee auto repair," and thus the home page is a better bet to fit their needs.

Then again, the history page at least has obvious standard nav links... so it's not a giant deal.

Cell 1250 :: alanmacdougall.com :: Illustrator tips

dunno about robots.txt but some (hopefully not painfully obvious to you already) points:

both pages have the same TITLE, which contains "milwaukee auto repair"

milwaaukee
history: 1
index: 0

auto
history: 9
index: 9

repair
history: 4
index: 5

from the above counts you can tell that history is the one that actually has all 3 words in the body text, giving it more weight in the ranking.

You should definitely use headlines man! Quick way to get index boosted is to put this first thing n that page:

<h1>Milwaukee Auto Repair Since 1965</h1>

or somesuch, and repeating it in the bodt text will help a great deal as well. Slip it into your alt tags as well (go ahead, double up with title as well, I don't think there's any penalty). Your use of background images is depriving you of the ability to get more alt text and title text in as well.

That's what stands out immeditely in the seo of that page, those will go a long way to not only helping the situation at hand but the overall ranking as well.

Jason

Hmm... it should have been painfully obvious, and yet somehow only word frequency was playing in my mind, not word location. I knew that my next step would have been to reword the front page to put more keywords in it, but I didn't know (or forgot) that headings count more, and I forgot entirely about alt tags. Thanks for the tips!

Cell 1250 :: alanmacdougall.com :: Illustrator tips

You can take a look here http://development.gurusnetwork.com/tutorial/wbtgd/8/ for some more info on searchengines/ranking/codestructure and so on.

And here you can check your site in a simulated spider: http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi
/Dan

{cell 260}
-{ a vibration is a movement that doesn't know which way to go }-

[This message has been edited by DmS (edited 10-03-2003).]

This should help some search engines to find your index page:

<link rel="index" href="/">

Put it in the head.

PT: I suspect JKMabry is essentially right - I'd imagine (unless they have just done a first initial pass) that they have indexed the whole site. I presume when you submitted your site the links all point to the main page and that most links pointing to your site point to that page so it is getting indexed. It just means that page ranks above the front one for your keywords.

Headers are hierarchical and so you technically can't just have a H3 and H1 is a powerful tag so make use of it and other structural markup tags like EM and STRONG.

I doubt a robots.txt file will help very much as they are largely used to restrict access to pages (although look through some resources as there may be some fancy things you can do).

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