12 January 2010
This isn’t going to be one of my usual long and boring posts with lots of technical mumbo jumbo instead I’m going to keep it really short as there isn’t really a lot to say on the subject but is a question that seems to keep cropping up.

It’s always a struggle getting all of the pages on a large e commerce site indexed especially when you have a client expecting results quickly so what do you do?

Webmaster Tools

First of all log into your Google account and setup a webmaster tools account. To access webmaster tools you can click here. Webmaster tools is an excellent resource for web masters as it gives you lots of information about the way Google views and manages your site and its content and is a must for any SEO.

Submit an XML Sitemap

If it’s a new or old website if you haven’t submitted an XML sitemap I would recommend that you do so. Not everybody will agree with me on this and some say that it isn’t necessary for indexing. My view is that if Google isn’t indexing your pages and you can do anything to help then why not?

A sitemap is basically a list of all of the URLs that you have on your website. One of the reasons for signing up to webmaster tools is that this is an area where you can upload your xml sitemap and tell Google first hand where it can find all of the pages on your website.

There are many tools out there that will generate an XML sitemap for you but most of them limit you to a maximum of 500 pages. This won’t help you with a large e commerce site but for your smaller websites they are great. You can purchase software that will create them for you but if you have a decent web developer it wouldn’t take them long to generate one on your behalf.

Blogging

Once you have submitted your sitemap to web master tools I suggest a vigorous blogging campaign dropping links to as many pages on your website as possible. Google seems to be crawling blogs a lot quicker these days so if you have lots of links pointing to different pages from your blog Google is sure to follow.

External Links

These are your biggest weapon for getting your site indexed. Start building lots and lots of quality links to your website. Building quality links to your website will help you in more ways than one and is the area that you need to spend most time on. The better the website you get a link from the more often Google will be visiting the page and the more likely it will be that it finds your website.

So there you have it my four easy steps to getting more pages indexed on Google.