Siders and bots visit site 65 times a day but cover .5 of a page

New web designer of own site

[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?

[PSilver]

Google have been changing their index, which gives the results, quite a lot since November, so maybe you've been caught in the bouncing up and down some websites are going through on the results. Otherwise - have you made any large changes to your website recently, like putting in frames? (Search engine spiders don't like frames, so your site can suffer in the results if you start using them.)

The spiders are coming back to check if pages have changed, so if they're coming back quite often that's a good sign. Every now and then you'll get properly spidered, where all the pages are read, but it sounds like they're just checking how 'fresh' your pages are and if they haven't changed they won't bother re-spidering because they all ready have a copy of it.

Clean HTML is written with the minimum of extra code in the page. So it tries not to use unnecessary images, or lots of spacer gifs and tables in layout, stuff like that. Often people who are in to clean HTML use stylesheets for layout, which are a great way of shifting code out of your pages and in to external files, which means there is less code on the page, which spiders like because it means they can find the content on the web page more easily.

Do searches for stuff like "css zengarden" for a website that has a great load of stuff about CSS and therefore clean HTML.

If you look at my user profile, my website uses CSS for layout and lots of very clean HTML.