Site Optimization: Key Points to Remember - More Accessibility Problems and Fixes
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There are certain things for which bigger is not necessarily better on the Internet, and one of those is file size. Most search engines will not fully index pages that are greater than 150K in size, unless they are really, really important (i.e. lots of pages, particularly ones outside the website, link to that page). If this seems unfair to you, consider the enormous index size, bandwidth, and load requirements of a search engine such as Google, and you might change your mind.
If you have a website for which you are building pages with very large amounts of content, you will want to keep the 150K limit in mind, especially if it is crucial that every word and page on your site is spidered and indexed. SEO Chat has a tool called "Page Size Lookup" which can tell you the size of your web page; you can check it out at http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/page-size/. Incidentally, another advantage to keeping your page sizes small, aside from search engines appreciating smaller pages, is that a smaller file size means that your pages will download faster for your users.
The final accessibility issue I would like to address is server reliability. If your site's server is slow, or it goes down more frequently than it should, spiders may have problems accessing it. Needless to say, web surfers will have problems accessing the site as well. Neither spiders nor surfers will be happy with a website that performs poorly.
If you are having problems with this issue, you will want to speak with your web host. Some web hosts provide guarantees concerning uptime; you should be prepared to hold them to any written contracts. If you cannot get satisfaction that way, you should consider switching hosts. Web Hosters, located at http://webhosting.devshed.com/, offers a number of articles that provide advice on choosing a web host. As a basic point, you typically get what you pay for; while there may be some companies that offer good web hosting services for free, if you run a business website, you should be prepared to invest some money in web hosting services to get the reliability that you need and your site visitors deserve.
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