It’s imperative to do a full technical analysis and website crawl audit before you start your search engine optimization campaigns.
“We have worked with many clients who have done extensive search engine optimization campaigns and spent thousands of dollars to do meta data rewrites, copy optimization and link building campaigns with other SEO firms and still are nowhere to be found in the search engines”, said Bill Ross of Rank Better SEO and Blue Wave Design Studio.

When talking with these businesses we get the same old “we tried it but it didn’t work” mentality, when if they had just started out with a website crawl audit and a technical analysis they would have seen that they either created a spider trap, had un-crawlable navigation or created some other programming trap that the spiders could not get out of in order to properly crawl and index the pages on their site. With a trap in place it would not matter how much SEO was done on the site because the spiders would not be able to get in to see the hard work that was done.

A full crawl audit makes sure the spiders are getting into your pages and you don’t have any road blocks to stop them from accessing the marketing you have done throughout your site.
An example that I came up against was when I was working with a large ecommerce site whose rankings dropped off significantly over a 3 month period for no apparent reason. They had paid a well known SEO firm to do meta data optimization an extensive internal and external link building campaign to help their rankings. After 3 months with this other firm and seeing minimal results we offered to do a quick crawl analysis on their site.

What we found was a spider trap they had created buy doing improper redirects and shopping cart link placement that trapped the spiders in an infinite loop and did not allow them to enter their site. Now we did find that some of their pages were gaining popularity in the search engines due to the fact that they were from a previous, less complicated form of the site that was able to be crawled by the search engines, but these pages were minimal and accounted for only 5 pages out of the 1200 skews they had on their site.

So they could have continued to spend thousands of dollars, I am sure that firm would have continued to pour money into more and more optimization with minimal results, but instead they came to us to find and fix the problem at the roots. We also looked at 2 other ecommerce sites they had, one being their 30 million dollar mother ship, and they had created the same crawl problem, along with duplicating content across their site with a programming error when writing their URL structure, and duplicating key content with their in house affiliate program.

So doing a technical analysis and crawl audit is imperative, can save a company thousands of dollars in the long run, and uncovers programming issues with the site that are not apparent on the surface that are effecting organic ranking and that keep you from getting ranked better in Google, MSN, and Yahoo on a much larger scale.

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