Finding content

It appears that the first step to make search engines like your website is to:

1. Make sure all the pages can be found.
2. Make sure all the content can be read.
3. Don’t do things that make them ignore you.

Since we took the Corporate Design Template from Microsoft, which supports Menus, Breadcrumbs, Sitemaps, WCAG 1.0 and doesn’t use Flash, we figure that ByStorm.com is pretty much covered on #1 and #2.

As far as #3, it seems to be more related to people who are trying to trick the search engine into giving them a higher rank. There are a bunch of ways to ‘attempt’ this, like links farms, keyword spam, hidden text, etc…

Since we believe in ‘doing the right thing’, #3 isn’t a big concern.

There is a nifty biff command that will show how many pages Google thinks a site has: ‘site:bystorm.com –pppppp’. Basically, all the command does is ask Google to show all the pages that don’t have the letters ‘pppppp’ on them. When we use it, all our pages, documents and even this blog shows up.

So Google is finding us, but just doesn’t think we have anything interesting to say. We’re to attack that next.