Now, those of you running small Web sites may be snickering at this point—you know how many pages you have, for Pete’s sake. And if you forget, well, you know how to count. Many medium-to-large Web sites, however, can’t pin down exactly how many pages they have. They need to use some method of estimating their total number of pages. Unless they know how many pages they have, they won’t know how many they hope to see in search engine indexes.
So, if you don’t know how many pages you have, how can you find out?
- Ask your Webmaster. If you’re in marketing, you might not realize that the IT people have a handle on this question. Your Webmaster has probably handled this question before, and has a ready answer.
- Count the number of documents in your content management systems. If you use a CMS, or even more than one CMS, you can typically ask the CMS how many pages it is managing. Even a free CMS such as WordPress can do this.
- Use your own spider. You can unleash special programs on your site, such as Xenu, which is designed to find pages that you might have overlooked.
- Take a guess. Maybe this sounds dumb, but it’s better to hazard a guess than to just throw up your hands. If every page costs money, you should at least have an idea of what you are spending. A guess is better than nothing.
Every page on your site costs money, so you should know how many there are. What’s your method?
