No, the above title is not a misprint. Everyone knows that today’s search engines are not capable of crawling or indexing your email! However, most people are not aware of the option they have to see a copy of any received email in your browser. Most of the time, this choice is set aside for the emails that are sent from marketers to site visitors who have opted in to receive a newsletter or something similar. Email copies such as this usually are shown as a simple HTML page. Unlike a regular email, this type page can be crawled and indexed, and could be an advantage to the effort you put toward your SEO.

If you are sending out marketing email to your web site visitors, most of those emails can be viewed in a browser if the email includes a statement such as “If you are having trouble reading this message, click here to read it in your browser.” Once the link is click, the email you sent will open in the browser as a static HTML page. Most of the time, your email is going to contain links that go to your website, which if clicked can give your site visitors more information, or perhaps a call to action. This can be used for the purpose of SEO link equity.

You may discover that there are certain emails that you would rather not have any of the search engines crawl and index. If this is the case, then you can format a robot.txt file to take care of this. Here is a good way to do this:

• Take the HTML versions of all the emails that you don’t mind the search engines crawling, and place them in a directory. Name the directory whatever you like.
• Place the HTML versions of all the emails that you do not want crawled by the search engines because of their content in another directory. Again, name the sirectory whatever you like.
• Next, you will update your robot.txt file so that it will disallow the directory that contains the email that you do not want crawled by any of the search engines like this:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /Folder Name

• You will want to be certain that all of the HTML versions that are in the “I want these crawled” folder that you made are using good SEO practices, such as your content, optimized headlines, and links that have keywords that go with the targeted SEO pages on your web site.
• In order to bring additional traffic and links to the targeted SEO pages on your website, you should add a “Share” option to any of the emails that will link to those pages. This helps link equity to naturally increase.
• If for some reason you are unable to add any body text links to these emails, you can make a “Quick Links” area over on the right panel in order to place links that go to your targeted pages.
• Next, add the URLs of the emails to your XML Sitemap.
• If you can, you should adjust your web metrics so you can see how your SEO performance will change for the better.