The
Importance of Deep Submission
The Importance of Deep Submission
If I ask you how many web sites do you have? You may say “One,
yes it is www.mycompany.com “ or “two” in case
you have a second organization or company. When I first began promoting
my web sites I was, like most people, only thinking in terms of
one web address, the url of my main page.
And I thought that this main page was a difficult one to promote
because it was the index page of a magazine that covered a wide
variety of fields (environment, arts, science, politics, spirituality,
etc). How could I optimize a page for so many keywords, which market
could I focus on?
It was only after discussing the subject with another web master,
who had a similar site, that I learned that the diversity of all
the inner pages of my site was a huge asset. Each of these pages
was like a mini-website, and capable of attracting a multitude of
visitors using a variety of keywords. Part of my ignorance at that
point was due to a lack of accurate tracking data.
I had a simple tracker on the main page that told how many visits
that page was getting, but I had no idea of what was happening deeper
inside the site. Then I was able to get access to the raw access
logs of the site and using a log analysis tool I began to see the
real picture of what was happening.
I saw that the main page was getting one third of the total traffic
of the site. I found out that one article, “The Causes of
Tropical Deforestation” was a big hit and consistently getting
a lot of traffic. Other articles were also quite popular, but covering
completely different subjects. It was then that I realized that
I had not one web site, but more than 100 web sites.
What does all this mean in terms of design, optimization and submission?
It means that one has to realize that people may well enter your
site through the “side door” or the “back door”
and you have to prepare accordingly.
For design, it means that the structure of your pages and navigation
system should invite the people who enter from the inner pages,
to make it to your important pages (about us, main page, or your
order page!). For optimization it means that you should take more
care about the placing of keywords, description and title tags on
all the pages.
Have you ever seen websites where the blue line at the top of the
browser is showing the title of the page to be “New Page”?
Even very good designers become a little bit sloppy on the inner
pages, and though they do usually manage to put a proper page title
on those pages, they seldom take the trouble to write separate meta
tags for the keywords and descriptions. But as I learned, these
pages are an asset and can be optimized and promoted to gain more
traffic.
The first thing that I did was to redesign my navigation system
to take advantage of this traffic and make sure that those who entered
through the back door would visit the important departments of the
magazine. I also put a newsletter sign-up form on all the inner
pages, and to this day these pages are bringing in a steady stream
of subscribers to the magazine’s e-mail bulletin. The next
thing I did was to make sure that the inner pages had proper meta
tags, and finally I did a deep submission of the whole site.
What is a deep submission and why is it necessary? When you submit
the main page of your site to a search engine, the search engine
sends a “spider” to look at your page and put the data
on that page in the search engines index. Sometimes the spider will
follow the links on your main page and also pick up some of the
inner pages (Google, for example is very good at this) but sometimes
they don’t go deep enough into the site and only one or two
of your pages are indexed.
To get the other pages indexed you have to submit them all separately,
just as if they were other web sites. However, if you have 100 pages
you can’t submit them on the same day to one search engine.
That would be regarded as spamming. If you submit one url per day
per search engine you will not get into any problems.
So, think about your site more deeply. Your inner pages are mini-websites
and if prepared and promoted properly they could increase your traffic
and your sales dramatically.
About the Author Donald Nelson is a
web developer, editor and social worker. He has been working on
the Internet since 1995, and is currently the director of A1-Optimization
(http://www.a1-optimization.com),
a company that provides low-cost search engine optimization and
submission services.He can be reached at support@a1-optimization.com
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