What does Google bot 13 visits, indexed an average of 1.3 pages mean?

[Denc]

I am really new at learning about web page development although my site has been established 5 years. I have been doing my own changes for the past 4 years without any training.

In December our main page ranked # 5 on Google and most of our 100 subpages ranked #1 or #2. Then womp! As of mid January we are now totally off Google and Yahoo with our main page along with most of our sub pages. Our visitor totals have dropped from nearly 500 per day to around 280 a day.

On our web logs we have AOL visit us 65 times a day viewing .5 of a page and Google bots between 3 and 30 times a day averaging 1.3 pages per visit.

What do these bots averages mean, and how if anything can I improve the length of their visits? Or are these visit frequencies and page averages normal?

Is there something that my website may have that is not acceptable to the search engines?

Also, can anyone give me an exampple of clean HTML. I don't know what this means. A text link. On my sub pages I have a link called home that takes visitors to my home page. Is home a good text link or should I have a few more words added to the link?

[Receptional]

AOL probably means AOL users - depends on your logs.

Someone will berate me if I am wrong but essential it looks like Google visited your site on 13 occassions during the period you are analysing. Sometimes it spidered 1 page, somtimes more than 1, making the total number of pages spidered divided by 13 = 1.3. That means Googlebot spidered pages 17 times.

Of course, it could have been mostly the default page every time.

These are not "deep crawls" of your site, so it may have decided that the site hasn't changed much and doesn't need to be completely reindexed.

Clean HTML means as little javascript and HTML that isn't text as possible in the code, so that the real meaning of your site stands out.