Archive for October 2011
10 Steps to Get Your Web Site Indexed by Google, Bing and Yahoo in a Day
October 14, 2011 | 
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Say you have a new business or website, how do you get Google, Yahoo, Ask, and Bing to index your site?? Let alone give it a high ranking?
Well, I have compiled a list of things that every webmaster/site owner or internet enthusiast could, and in some instances, should do to make sure a web site is indexed in as little as a day or two.
10 Steps to get your site indexed in a day….
1. Create at least 3 to 7 pages of content.
Hey, a “Coming Soon”, or “Under Construction” page with a construction worker type animated gif was great in the 90′s but nowadays it won’t get you very far… Create a few pages of decent readable, useful content – remember text in images format can’t be crawled!! Make sure you do the basic SEO stuff correctly:
Each page MUST have unique page title Each page must have a unique meta tags for description and keywords All links / href’s MUST have “Title” properties and Images must have descriptive “Alt” properties Avoid a “loading” message or a page redirect for your main home page 2. Create a template/menu structure
Make sure all the pages link to each other by using a template menu structure. Ideally, the links/href’s should be text based and be descriptive, so that they can be easily crawled.
3. Make sure HTML pages correctly formed
Go to totalvalidator.com or use the W3C Validator – validator.w3.org to ensure your pages are well formed. Search engines will give you a lower ranking or even ignore you if your pages are that badly written and do not include enough information. I also recommend making sure your website is cross browser compatible, using a tool like Multi-Browser Viewer or similar.
4. Create a Sitemap.
Sitemaps have evolved over the years and there are still various forms out there (HTML, RSS and graphical sitemaps). Google and the other major search engines have adopted a common standard though, that will list all pages in your website and help identify the most important pages. There are quite a few free sitemap generators out there. For small sites I recommend this one: xml-sitemaps.com
5. Create a Webmaster Tools account and Submit / Ping Sitemap.
After you have created your sitemap and have uploaded the sitemap to the root of your website, you must submit the sitemap to the various search engines. It is recommended to create a webmaster tools account at the various big search engines:
Google (www.google.com/webmasters/tools): Google has a very useful Webmaster Tools facility, which allows you to view extra information that is helpful to all webmasters. It is essentially Google’s view of your website. Bing (www.bing.com/webmasters): Bing’s webmaster tools ahs also improved dramatically over the last year or so, but it not quite as useful as Google’s yet. Yahoo (siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com): Even less useful than Bing, but still required for now. After you have registered at the various Webmaster tools you can resubmit updates or ping your updated sitemap to search engines at any time, although it should be crawled and updated automatically. Search Engine Sitemap Ping / Submit URL’s:
Google: wwwgoogle.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=[complete sitemap address] Yahoo: search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=[Complete sitemap web address] Ask: submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=[your sitemap web address] MSN Live: webmaster.live.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=[your sitemap web address] Note: Google requires you to submit your sitemap to them first via the Webmaster’s tools interface. Only then can you ping them using the above URL. Yahoo and Ask.com allow the ping to act as a submission as well.
6. Link from highly trafficked bookmarking sites
These are sites are visited regularly by search engine crawlers so if there is a link to your website it will be indexed quite quickly. You will have to create an account with these sites, to enable you to link to your site. Some of the bookmarking sites that you can use include Del.icio.us, BlinkList, StumbleUpon.com and digg.com. Social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace will also help. Try to link using some of the popular phrases like the list at the bottom of BlinkList page. At the end of the day it is about getting high quality links to your site.
6. Create/comment on a blog.
Create a blog on blogger.com or another blogging provider (there are many different blogging options these days) and start blogging about your area of expertise and how it relates to your website. Feel free to promote your site, as long as it contributes to an open discussion and is not just another fake blog/marketing scheme. The alternative is to mention your website in a comment on a related blog of someone else, but again it has to be as part of a discussion where you make a contribution to that person’s blog!
7. Comment on a popular forum/help pages.
Make sure you include your website URL as part of your forum profile and comment on a forum that you are part of, or help a newbie out on a subject that you are an expert of, in a related forum or help site. It is about good web karma too!
8. Install and activate Google Analytics
Google analytics is probably one of the coolest freebies for any webmaster. Sign up for Google Analytics free at wwwgoogle.com/analytics. You will have to add a simple script to all your HTML pages to make sure it is tracked properly, but the information you will get out of it is extremely valuable and will help you improve and better target your pages over time.
9. Use Google AdSense
If it makes sense for your web site you may consider running Google advertising on your web site. Although AdSense and AdWords are supposedly separately indexed from Google’s search indexing, there are some evidence to the contrary, and some sites that serve AdSense advertising have been indexed more quickly than other sites that don’t serve AdSense advertising. Hey, you might even earn a few bucks, it may be worth a shot, right?!
10. Use Google AdWords
Again very similar to point 9, no real proof that advertising your web site domain with Google AdWords would really benefit, but if you want cover all your bases and get indexed as soon as possible, its worth a try…at the very least AdWords allow you to drive targeted traffic to your site with minutes. Using Google Analytics above you can also track conversions and start measuring your ROI.
If you follow these 10 steps your site should be crawled by Google, Bing and Yahoo pretty quickly, obviously I can’t guarantee your site being crawled in a day…but doing the above 10 steps will go a long way to ensure you are indexed and crawled quickly. Remember the above might ensure you get indexed and included in search engines quickly, but only a regularly updated site, with high quality, useful content will ensure you get high rankings within the various search engines.
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MSN Live to Support Sitemap 0.90 Protocol-What Does This Really Mean?
Three months ago, Google and Yahoo! announced that they have joined forces to support a unified system of submitting Web pages to their crawlers. Google launched their Google Sitemaps protocol as part of their Webmaster Tools in June 2005 and Yahoo! recently with their Yahoo! Site Explorer.
On the sitemaps.org website, it states that Microsoft is also supporting this new protocol standard but the question that lies yet to be answered is – How is MSN Live’s Sitemaps Submission product going to function?
The day the information was released to the public, the General Manager of Live Search, Ken Moss, announced that they are excited to be apart of the Sitemaps protocol standard. Ken Moss states, “We are 100% behind this protocol – this kind of collaboration will help improve the search experience for all of our customers, and we are working hard to release full support in 2007.”
I wonder what type of support Microsoft is thinking of providing. As we all know, Microsoft does everything in their power to not only duplicate what their competition has done but also seeks to jeopardize their competition at the same time. If Microsoft is going to create a Sitemaps submission product, I bet they are going to do it in a way that affects many types of web development and consulting firms that offer creation tools and services to submit Sitemaps to Google and Yahoo.
If this happens, I think it will be a bad move for Microsoft. If you look at what Google and Yahoo! have done, they’ve created their Sitemaps submission products in a way that allows other web companies to prosper by offering Sitemaps creation tools and services to submit Sitemaps to their search engines.
Now I’m just speculating here. So until Microsoft either releases information or launches their beta product to the public we really won’t know what they are thinking. I just hope when they say “collaborate”, they know it means to ‘cooperate’ and not to ‘dominate’.
To read Microsoft’s accouncement, view Ken Moss’s statement.
Tips For Better Search Engine Position Ranking
If you are trying to get your search engine position ranking higher, one place to start is to use different webmaster tools to do so. The way these tools can help your site’s position is by helping you optimize your site in terms of what the search engines want to see. The more information they have about your site, the greater are the chances that your site will get a top position and get higher ranked. If the idea sounds pretty good to you, you should probably know that most search engines have their own webmaster tools. As a result, you can expect Google, Yahoo and all the others to have different tools. There is nothing to worry about though, as most of them are pretty much the same, so you will have no problems using them.
There are also other ways you can use to work on getting your search engine ranking higher. One of the most important ones is focusing on your website content. Getting high ranked is not all about keywords and backlinks. In order for you to get to that part, you will have to focus on having original content. Copied content will always occupy a low position, and will do nothing to get your page rank higher. If you feel like you have poor quality content, you can still do something about it. Poor content might very well be the reason why your site has not gone the way you had hoped it will. Changing it with quality, original content can give your site a high rank in no time.
When you have created some good content for your site, you can start focusing on using high value keywords in that content. A good, strong keyword needs to combine two features. It needs to be accessed (searched for) very often, and present interest to people, without having too much competition. You can use Google keyword tools to find some of these keywords.
Once your content is optimized, the best thing you can do is get lots of good backlinks from other websites. You can use a combination of article marketing, forum posting, and social bookmarking to get started. However, it is a really good idea to get a head start on the competition by signing up for a good backlink network so that you can get lots of good quality links without having to spend endless hours doing so.