Focusing on just one aspect of SEO can hinder more than help your optimization efforts. For instance, only taking care of your keyword research can prove a futile effort if search engines are unable to crawl your site. Having too much code on the page can increase the code to content ratio, thus reducing the density of the targeted keyword for that page.

Also, if you set up your robots.txt file incorrectly by not writing the correct instruction to not index certain pages, ones optimization efforts can be thwarted. If a large website with thousands of pages only wants the most important pages indexed, the search engine spiders may only index a certain portion of the site and may not be able to include the more important pages in its index. Another factor that may hinder a website’s performance if not included in optimization is the lack of quality inbound links to the site. You could have the best web content in the world, but if people are not linking to it, the lack of traffic to the site could make the rest of the optimization worthless.

It’s also important to ensure that all of the meta data on the site is as unique as possible. To increase the reach in the search engines for multiple search terms, keeping your titles, descriptions and keywords as unique as possible can make the world of difference in search engine indexing.

To conclude, it is intelligent to have a holistic approach to SEO as opposed to only utilizing one aspect. To truly give your website the best chance to rank well in the search engine results pages, fixing multiple SEO issues can only serve to give you that extra edge.

Page load time is an important factor in website optimization if only for the fact that if the pages of your site take too long to appear, users can become impatient, stop the load and go to another website. In fact, this is one of the big reasons I was so fond of Google right from the start – their nice clean homepage design had one big advantage over their competitors at the time – it came up quickly and gave me what I wanted right away without making me wait for pictures and other Flashy stuff to load. So we know that fast load time is good for users but what effect does load time have on search engine rankings? This is a question that comes up quite often. Matt Cutts of Google recently asked for topic suggestions for his latest video and this was the number one question.

So, can a delay in page load time affect your search engine rankings? The short answer is yes. Even if load time is not directly a factor in the search engine algorithms, slow load time could lead to a loss of rankings for a website – particularly a very large website. The reason is that in order for your pages to rank to their full potential in the search engine results, search engines need to have accurate information about them. Both the content on the page and the linking structure of the page are important factors in the search engine algorithm.

To illustrate further, consider this diagram to be a rough model of a site’s linking structure. If the page represented by the node highlighted in yellow isn’t crawled by the search engine spider, all the other links that originate from it may not be found either, and that can affect not only the ranking of the top page but also the ranking of all the other pages beneath it, even if the search engine spiders can find those pages another way. This is because they won’t have the full information about how these pages are linked together.

If search engines do not see the full linking structure of a page because it takes too long to crawl the links on your site, linking structure information is not included in the index and the page will rank lower in the search results than it deserves. This is why including an xml sitemap on your site is not good enough to get individual pages indexed and ranked. Search engines have to see how the pages fit together as well.

Search engines cannot give you any credit for something they don’t see. The spiders have a limited amount of time to crawl a site and if page load time is too long, they are less likely to fully crawl your site and that can affect your rankings. Recently, Live.com’s Webmaster Blog did a special four-part series describing special optimization issues for large websites that featured some excellent advice for webmasters with tips for optimizing content, site structure and server configurations. Helping spiders get at your content as quickly and efficiently as possible is an important aspect of search engine optimization so load time should always be given a high priority in any large-scale website optimization project.

While writing several blog posts and documentation, I often have used example.com to stand in for any domain name. One of the Internet standards established by the Internet engineers circa 1999 set aside example.com (as well as example.org and example.net) for documentation purposes. So if you were to click on a link to http://www.example.com in my post, you wouldn’t see an actual web page. Click on this link to see for yourself.

I’d like to demonstrate a fun little trick you can use to amaze your friends.

The page you see is when you go to http://www.example.com is completely indexable by the search engines. There’s not a lot of content, but you would think that the engines will have indexed the content exactly as your browser shows it to you. It turns out that there is a robots.txt file that blocks all spiders from all content inside www.example.com. (If you ever forget how to create a basic robots.txt file, you can use this one as a guide.) Alright, now for the punch line. Let’s see what the search engines really have indexed for http://www.example.com. Go to www.google.com and type “site:example.com” (without the quotes). What do you see? If you see only one result, click on the link: repeat the search with the omitted results included.

I see 10,400 results now. There are pages like example.com/blah/ and www.example.com/concepts. The Google search results page does not have links to the cached version for any of these results, unfortunately, so we can’t see what exactly Google has indexed from these pages, but we can go to the page ourselves. Well, I tried that, and every page I go to replies back with “Not Found.” It’s logical to conclude that those pages never existed, but also notice some of the results have been crawled by Google in the past few hours. Impossible, no?

You can try this search on other search engines too.
My feeling on this strange phenomenon is that it could either be Google’s own testing or other people testing or somehow tricking Google into adding these pages to its index. It may be relegated to certain data centers as well.

Whatever is causing this, I’m sure Google knows about it, but doesn’t feel the need to do anything about it. This phenomenon may also get you thinking about how search engines are supposed to work.