As Google states “Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the Google index and obtain detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google”

This is obviously a significant advantage for a webmaster running a search engine optimiation program on their site. Information direct from Google on how the site has been crawled and where the problems are.

Unfortunately for you to access the full information Google needs to verify that you are the operator of the site and this is not always easy although there is a simple solution.
Read the rest of this entry »

Google sitemaps are google’s way to allow a webmaster to submit all their siteURLs to the Google index and be able to view detailed reports about the visibility of their website pages on Google.

Further to this the sitemaps can be updated and keep Google aware of all the pages in the site and, most importantly, when changes are made to specified pages to help improve the efficiency of the Google visits to the site and subsequent indexing.  The goal is to improve your search engine optimisation activities.

In the last few years Read the rest of this entry »

You now have regular search engine bot visits and your blog is on the search engine map, what next ?

You now need to direct the bot to the pages in your main web site with your best keyword rich content to ensure that they are indexed. Make sure that the code is clean and your pages are ready for indexing.

If you are in that position create a within page link from your blog article to the page you want indexed. An example is below, note that the link is not just a url but has Read the rest of this entry »

XHTML compliant code. Ok you have read about that and agree that your code should at least be syntax correct to stand a chance of a high search engine ranking.

So how do you go about validating your site html code?

Well fortunately there are several web sites which will do this for you.

Check out http://validator.w3.org/ and be prepared for some surprises.

Is your code correct or does your developer need to do some rework?

There is a balance to be achieved in the actions you take to optimise your site for the mighty search engines and for your viewing customers.

Search engines feed on keywords and clean html code. They dislike flash graphics and broken links.

Customers will create value for you with clear calls to action, crisp marketing messages and a compelling proposition which they can access.

So how do we achieve the balance …. or do we need to. Read the rest of this entry »

Pinging is a process whereby you alert the blog search engines that you have updated your blog. Most blog software has a configuration option to detail which blog sites you want to alert, they should also come preconfigured with the most popular ping services.

This is different from the process that you might follow in relation to your core website. Typically you ‘submit’ your website to a search engine and it files your address (url), visiting at some point in the future. At this point the search engine spider will index as much of the site as it can navigate and you site will be included in its index a while after this.

What is the advantage of the pinging approach? Read the rest of this entry »

Your first activities should be to regularly update your new blog – creating content. By content I mean real content which adds to the web collection and will interest visitors and readers. Please don’t write rubbish, if we do that we will ultimately devalue the value of the Internet.

After each article you need to ping the blog submission services. This is like an advert notifying them that you have created something new.

Do this regularly for a few days and the bots will come to check out the action.

What is a ping? How do I do it? ……. answers soon.

This is one of a series of four articles:

Fishing for Google part 1

Fishing for Google part 2

Fishing for Google part 3

Fishing for Google part 4

So, let’s re-trace our steps. We want to attract Google, why?

The real target is your web site where you can transact with visitors and turn visits into revenue. This can sell your products direct, gain commission from selling partners products or service your customers and lower your operating costs.

You can submit this ecommerce site to Google but we want to attract Google in a quicker timescale. It has a huge list of ecommerce sites to visit.

That is where your blog comes in. It contains content, content which Google wants so let it have it BUT also learn to signpost your ecommerce site from the blog laying a paper trail for it to follow.

This is one of a series of four articles:

Fishing for Google part 1

Fishing for Google part 2

Fishing for Google part 3

Fishing for Google part 4

Optimising your site is essential but it will count for nothing if the search engines do not come calling. So how do we attract them?

You could use the standard way by submitting to the engines.

You could also submit to a directory – the grandpa being DMOZ, but there is another quicker way.

At the moment Google has a ferocious appetite for blogs so why not start one.

I will tell you more in later posts but suffice to say this blog attracted Google (and Yahoo) a couple of days after I started posting and the bot then flowed through to sites I had linked to.

Blogs are Google content candy at the moment and it loves content.

This is one of a series of four articles:

Fishing for Google part 1

Fishing for Google part 2

Fishing for Google part 3

Fishing for Google part 4

Spiders look for the robots.txt file in your web site home directory to tell them what they can index.

Have you checked your site robots.txt file, is it allowing the spiders in or blocking them?

The file is a text file with a simple structure such as: -

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-content/
Disallow: /wp-images/
Disallow: /wp-includes/

This file allows in all the spiders but prevents them from visiting the named sub-directories.

Why don’t you do a search in Google for Robots.txt Validator to find the many online services which will report the content of your robots.txt file and let the search engines into your site.