Last updated on September 5th, 2010 at 06:07 pm

Many webmasters work hard to build sites and it can be very frustrating when not all the site is read and indexed by the search engines and those pages that are read do not feature well in the results.  The initial thought is often “why in my site not appearing” usually followed by “my site deserves to be at the top of the results”.

There are many reasons that pages on your site may not be ranking as well as you hope or expect.  These can include :-

• you may be competing against some well established sites in your industry
• your competitors may be publishing information or have a forum that people find useful and link to
• competing sites may have invested in good quality SEO (search engine optimisation) work
• your website may be new and not yet have any good quality links to it
• there may be problems on your site

If you are convinced that your site is not competing against well established sites that have good information and have carried out SEO (or even if it is) it may be that  you need to carry out a site review.  Here at Forest Software we review sites for clients looking for problems that may hinder website rankings, however here are just a few things that you should think about if you are considering a review of your website.

• Why do you have a website – is it to inform existing customers about your services / products. to offer customer support, to attract new customers or (as some people have told me) because everyone else has one.
• What do your visitors want from your site – customer support, product information, down-loadable documents etc
• Are you trying to convert visitors into customers? – how will you measure a conversion, is it a sale, capturing an email address, downloading a product document, subscribing to a newsletter for example.

Once you have your basic ideas look at your site with a fresh eye – ask someone that has never seen your site before to take a look at it and find their way around it – try to watch what the visitor does without making any comments, remember that there is no right or wrong way to navigate though a website.  Make notes of the path followed and any comments made – you may know how to reach your order or contact page but does the person you are watching find it.

Next have a look at the entire navigation – there used to be a “rule” that, in my view, still applies – you should be able to get from any page to any other page on your website with a maximum of three clicks, this is where a site map may help you. You will see from our site that the navigation means that it is easy to get from one page to another.  Try to embed links to other pages in the text of your pages where relevant so that your visitors can find their way to linked pages easily (see the “site map” link above as an example).

Many of the problems with websites not being indexed can be put down to poor navigation, remember that both human visitors and search engines will appreciate being able to move around the site easily.

The next post in this series will deal with some of the more technical elements of a site review and some of the tools available both online and offline that will help you spot problems and how to solve them.