Question
What's the difference between Submitted verses Indexed URLs under Sitemaps in Webster Tools?
Answer
Submitted pages are those pages we've submitted to Google from the Sitemap on your website. Indexed pages are those pages Google finds by spidering or crawling your website naturally. It is not uncommon for your Indexed pages to be lower than your Submitted pages. Yes, ideally want your Indexed pages to be just as much as the Submitted pages. The tricky part is knowing which pages are not indexed! While it is possible to figure this out using Google Analytics and scrapers like Outwit, this is beyond the scope of services Modern Retail provides and instead is the domain of a dedicated third-party SEO firm. However, there are things you can do to improve these Indexed pages, namely:
- Getting more websites to link to the pages in your website.
- Adding unique content to all the pages in your site and modifying the all important SEO tags.
The first one involves getting people to link to your website. A good place to start here is with your vendors. If your vendor has a website with a directory of where visitors can buy your their products online, you must contact them to get you listed in their directory and linked to your website. Ideally they should like to their brand or designer page in your site instead of the homepage. However, any link will be useful. Another useful way of getting inbound links is by writing engaging content for your readers in your blog. Visitors who like your writing will automatically link to it from their website, blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
The second method involves adding unique content to the shopping and content pages in your website. This is either done in WordPress for your content pages or Store Manager for your shopping pages. Please read the following Help pages for more information:
Another really useful SEO tactic is to add "shopping headers" on your department and brand pages. Not only do these headers add some nice copy to the top of the page for your visitors but it will also improve your SEO and help more pages get indexed by Google. Please read the following Help page for more information:
As you can see with a little work you can improve the SEO on your website, which increase your traffic and improve the pages indexed by Google. If you haven't read it already, you should read the following Help page about getting started with SEO:
Additional References
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Webmaster Tools Help
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Webmaster Central Blog
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Webmaster Central Companion Site
Date Created: 11/09/13