Indexation

Indexation is one of the most important website assessment criteria that should be checked and improved for better site performance. It's via search engines that you can find out about this website assessment criteria and see your indexation.
Indexation Discovery of a Website

To find out how large your indexation is, you can go to major search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN and type: site:www.YourWebsite.com. The result will be all the pages indexed at each of those search engines.
Indexation in Search Engines

Indexation is a process done by search engines to record the presence of websites on the Internet and some of their details like title, description and a link. This website assessment criteria cannot be attended to without referring to search engines. They constantly crawl the web to index new pages as well as the changes in the pages already indexed.

The first step to promote a website is to make sure your site has gone through indexation process by search engines, specially by the major ones like Google, Yahoo and MSN. If you've submitted your website successfully to search engines, they should have indexed your web pages.
Indexation as a Major Website Assessment Criteria

The more pages of a web site are indexed by search engines, the better indexation it has compared to its competitors. In other words, each result at Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) contains a link to that website and each link will count.

By this website assessment criteria, you will also learn about your competitor's performance. You will know how well your competitors' websites are doing in the eyes of major search engines.

Therefore, when you evaluate this aspect of the competitor's performance, you may wonder how they could have such extensive indexation. The answer is "rich content" that makes a sizeable site (consisting of many pages) with lots of information for its visitors. So, it can make both visitors happy and search engines indexation enriched.

Note: Let's not forget that websites using illegitimate methods could be removed from search engines' indexes even if they've already been recorded by them. A thorough website assessment could reveal such techniques, tricks, on websites.
What about Directories?

During checking your competitors' indexation at search engines, you'll probably come across several links coming from directories. Directories are also as important as search engines.

The more links from directories you get, the better you've satisfied website assessment criteria. Of course, it's always ideal to be first listed by major directories like Yahoo and Open Directory (DMOZ). Having been indexed there, you could automatically be listed at other directories!

Before submitting your own website to directories, make sure you've professionally controlled the quality of your site. Directories have the personnel who look at websites before approving and accepting them. I'm sure you don't want to be rejected by them for little unimportant deficiencies at your website!

When it comes to competition, you'll have to catch up with them in terms of number of links from directories and even surpass them.
Better Indexation Condition

To improve indexation as one of the major website assessment criteria, you'll have to add more information (web pages) to your website. What you can do is to add the following items to your site:
* A section for articles,

* A glossary for your field of expertise,

* photo gallery,

* A directory of various resources,

* A set of freebies like whitepapers, guidelines, etc,

* A set of downloadable files or softwares,

* A set of links to similar websites all across the world,

* And so forth.
Of course, the main purpose of adding more information is to add value to your site. You should consider the needs of your visitors. Needless to say, more pages and more indexation are the natural consequence of quenching the website assessment criteria.
Indexation Is Limited

Search engines cannot index certain pages like those having forms, passwords or registration in them. In addition to this fact, search engines may and may not index all your pages. So, if you want all your web pages or at least some of them to be definitely indexed, make sure you submit them separately yourself.

dition, if there are web pages on your website that aren't linked from other websites, don't expect search engines to index them.

There shouldn't be orphan pages on your website. They're the pages to which none of your website's pages have posted a link. You must not have those pages on your site. It's highly recommended to find those pages and do something about them:
* Have a page adopt them, or

* Delete them from your server.
Then, submit them to search engines.

As you can see, without replying positively to this website assessment criteria, a major part of your efforts will be in vain no matter how well you design your website or master your profession.