Search Marketing Answers

Blogging is all the rage - and it’s become a great way for business owners to help promote products or services beyond a standard otherwise static web site.  But what good is a blog if nobody finds it?   Search engine optimization for blogs requires proper planning.  Here are eight key steps to help you optimize your blog for SEO.
Step 1.  Category Naming

Most blogs allow you to create your own categories so that you can group your blog articles.  One of the first steps to optimizing a blog for search engine position value is to name your categories using your most important keyword phrases.

Step 2.  Article Name Seeding

Be sure to have an individual article’s top two phrases as part of the article name This is vital because the article’s name becomes the page Title and the URL for that article.  Of course if you make your article titles too long this will make it more difficult to capture your audience’s attention and if you attempt to abuse this technique purely for stuffing keywords in every article, you may eventually find your site penalized by the search engines.  So always try to find a balance in how far you go.

Step 3.  Content Content Content

Make sure each article has at least two or three paragraphs of content where you mix up the use of each individual word from your Article title keyword phrases. The more content, the more you can seed your phrases in a natural way and the more value is thus given those phrases. So five paragraphs is better than two, and eight is better than five.
Step 4.  Mix It Up

It’s okay to have one or two uses of each phrase in it’s original syntactical order, but it’s just as important to then use the individual words from a phrase either in reverse order if intelligently possible or split up.
Step 5.  Cross Link Articles

For more value on individual blog articles, provide links to them from other articles where the links are embedded in the article content, and where they are inside paragraphs where that paragraph discusses the contents of that article
Step 6.  Build Authority Relationships

Create other links within articles where those links go to 3rd party web sites – the more authoritative those 3rd party sites, the more your article will be seen as helpful, relevant and trustworthy for the specific keyword phrases related to the article.
Step 7.  Link Titles

Each link you embed in your site - either a link to another page on your site or a link out to another site should have a title in the link tag.  Most blog software allows you to add a title to the link from within your blog’s rich text editor and you need to take advantage of the opportunity.  Title’s should be appropriate to describing the page the link points to while incorporating at least one keyword phrase relevant to the landing page but the most value comes when that phrase is relevant to the page you’ve go the link on as well.

Step 8.  Build Inbound Authority

Link to individual articles in the blog or at the very least, the blog home page from other web sites, including your business web page, your LinkedIn profile page, etc…  Any sites you own should of course have a main link to your blog - so that link appears on every page of that web site.  Subit your link to the search engines and any web directory related to your business as well.  Consider sending out a press release through a web service such as PRWeb.com - where their SEO level or higher release service allows you to optimize that press release for SEO value - and embed at least one link to the blog in the release.  For $200 (current price as of 07/2008), it’s a bargain for obtaining high quality links back to your blog!

So there you have it - 8 steps to optimize your blog for SEO.  Now this is by no means the only 8 steps you’ll need to implement - distributing your blog through RSS, incorporating a sitemap.xml file, and all the other essential tasks for search engine optimization you can read about on my White Hat SEO Fundamentals page….  But if all you do is follow the above 8 steps, you’re at least starting on the right foot!

So Adobe and Google have announced that Google is now crawling and Indexing Flash content.  You can read Vanessa Fox’s write up with details here at search engine land.  This is yet the latest attempt by Adobe to snow-job designers and developers.  Ever since they first claimed to add “SEO friendly” capabilities several versions ago, I’ve laughed at such nonsense.  But now that Google is on the marketing hype bandwagon with this, I’m dismayed because I know most people won’t bother to investigate the limits and the implications of those limits and I’m appalled at Google’s complicit behavior…

Even though they state the limitations if you look closely enough, the marketing juggernaut has already taken it’s toll in countless news sites and tech sites reporting only the spin, or glossing over the limits.

Here are just a few of the most important reasons why it’s still a bad idea to try and create any deep content rich web site in Flash if you care about search engine optimization through on-site methods.

• 1.  No Meta Data
• 2.  No capacity to distinguish text formatting (so no h1, no bold, or strong, or italics, no bullet points, none of it.)
• 3.  You have to create your flash file in a way that results in having a separate URL associated with every major piece of content in the Flash file.
• 4.  You can only have one page Title if the entire site is in Flash so how are you supposed to optimize a 50 page site built entirely in Flash when you only have ONE page title?
• This is now leaving the door wide open for black hat hacks to stuff text into their Flash file for search engine indexing purposes and where a site visitor will NOT be able to tell such text is there, and where through the use of FLV and images, they can present you with whatever BS they want, and Google will have NO WAY to know.

 Do I really need to go on here people?

Google’s response to such concerns is essentially “this is the same issue with PDF documents, and we index those, so what’s the problem?”

OH MY GOD.

How many web sites that do really well in the search engine results are made up of 50 pages that are all PDF documents?

Sure,  if you have a sufficiently optimized HTML page that happens to link to a PDF document, and where that PDF document’s focus is related to the page from which it is linked, a search may bring that PDF back in the results.

But we’re not talking about one page content here, we’re talking about entire web sites.  That need to have dozens or hundreds of keyword phrases, grouped into tiny bite-size chunk groups of three or four phrases per page.  And where every page’s connection from an optimization perspective to each other page’s relevance relationship matter.

So Adobe and Google, as much as I love you both, do everyone who is less intuitive and visionary as I am (having known every time they have claimed Flash is a viable solution for SEO that they were full of it) a favor and be more forthcoming about the severity of these still existing limitations.

8 Key Points To Proper Site Design for SEO

Things You Should Know Before A Site’s Final Mapping Is Completed

If you are considering a redesign to an existing web site or creating a brand new site for the first time, there are some fundamental rules to every web site’s design and development strategy that need to be considered if you are to obtain maximum Search Engine Optimization value.

This page describes the most fundamental standard site architecture, content and design aspects related to the SEO process. If any one of these aspects is not implemented, the result will mean more time, energy, and effort will need to be applied to other SEO techniques.
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1. Macromedia Flash & SEO
While Macromedia Flash allows for a very aesthetically pleasing site, it’s by far the most difficult presentation from an SEO perspective. Even in it’s current version, Flash offers very little truly high quality ways in which to incorporate SEO techniques. Unless a web site can garner thousands of links back from high quality web sites, it’s almost impossible to get a Flash based site into high ranking at Google.

At the same time, incorporating elements of Flash can be acceptable from an SEO perspective. Flash however can not be used for main site navigation or for conveying any truly important or keyword related content.
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2. Use of Images For Content
Similar to the Macromedia Flash issue, any time graphic elements are used for textual content, the SEO value of that information is for the most part, lost. While every image on the site can have an alternate text attribute where you can describe the contents or purpose of the image these fields should normally be limited to 10 words or less. We also have the ability in one of the most common SEO techniques, to seed some of the keywords into these spaces, so that further reduces the flexibility of using alternate text attributes related to whatever a graphic image’s purpose is.
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3. Depth of site.
While a site that’s only four or five pages, when properly seeded, can do quite well in the search engines, it’s always better to have more content spread among more pages. With every additional page that contains at least a few paragraphs of content, we can increase the total number of pages indexed at Google as well as the ranking weight for every other page on the site. To this end, it is important to come up with a site flow that allows for such growth, even if the initial site starts with only a handful of pages.

Also, any page on the site should never be more than two clicks down in the chain. Making a site too layered harms the SEO value of each sub-page.
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4. Length of content
No single page should have any less than three or four paragraphs of content. As a general rule, each paragraph or every alternating paragraph should incorporate one or more of the keywords specific to that page, but not necessarily entire phrases. We don’t want to alienate the reader, or go overboard. So this is a balancing act.

This is important to note because any single page should have between three and five keyword phrases at most. So if my work reveals a total of 15 high priority phrases, and another 10 very good phrases due to the competitive opportunity, that’s a total of 25 phrases that need to be split down into groups of three to five per page.

Because of this, it would be most beneficial to all of us if we are able to do the keyword selection process before the content is written. This aspect is the most important in the entire SEO process, and the more we can sync each page’s phrase group with the content you write, up front, the less effort we’ll both need to make.
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5. Location Location Location
For web sites that represent a business enterprise focused on attracting local or regional clients or customers, the office location(s) address(es) need to be seeded throughout the site. The more pages on the site that have a business address, the better our opportunity for getting higher ranking in the Google Local listings.
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6. Professional Services Web Sites
Every major topic related to a professional practice should have it’s own web page. This relates to the keyword phrasing limitations as well as the amount of content, as well as the overall number of pages on a site.

Examples: For doctors, this means a separate page for each type of major procedure performed. For attorneys, every area of Practice needs its own page.
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7. Videos and SEO
I’ve just recently performed an exhaustive effort related to Video SEO Best Practices for a site I’m now tasked with doing the SEO work for that specializes in Travel Video sharing and blogs. If video files or clips will be presented on the site, there are a number of tasks that should be performed specific to these files for SEO value. The very first is when the video is produced or digitized, it needs to be properly seeded with appropriate keyword phrases at the code level.

If you are not familiar with Video file MetaData, this is where the person who edits or digitizes the video embeds things such as a title, description, keyword tags, creation date, and other information right into the video file through a software process.

So the Video’s MetaData should most definitely be embedded with the SEO track in mind. The Title should include the keyword phrases most appropriate for the video, and the keyword phrases should go through the SEO analysis process given how massive the online video market is.

The web page such videos appear on should then properly match that MetaData in all aspects (page title, keywords, textual content describing the video, etc…) No less than a full paragraph should be on the page associated with that video as well…
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8. Site Architecture - Link Name and URL Issues
To get maximum SEO value, it is vital that a site’s Link Naming and URL structure is one that is human readable and embedded with keyword phrases. In the blog world, a link name and URL done this way is said to have a “permalink”. (Permanent Link).

The more closely a page Title and Keywords match the Page URL and the link name to that URL, the more exponentially we gain SEO value. The more we do this, the longer the page will rank high for these phrases (permanent link value!)

For example My site - www.HeyDudeWheresMySite.com - there’s a page with a link titled “Affordable SEO Services”. Note how the Link Title is not just “Services”. That’s because One of my most important phrases is “affordable SEO Services” .

Then - if you look at the page’s actual URL it’s

http://www.heydudewheresmysite.com/Affordable-SEO-Services/

So there’s a folder in my site’s directory where that folder is actually called “Affordable-SEO-Services” and the page it points to is an index.cfm file in that folder! A non SEO optimized version of this would have been

http://www.heydudewheresmysite.com/services.cfm

or

http://www.heydudewheresmysite.com/page2.cfm

and a semi optimized structure would be http://www.heydudewheresmysite.com/services

This issue applies for every type of site out there. Marketing sites, ECommerce Sites… No longer is a page URL like www.whatever.com/shop/PID=345&cat=29 any good to us even though Google can read those pages.

I’ve seen countless blog posts, discussion forum threads and SEO “expert” articles where the author claims that it takes weeks or months to get a site indexed at the search engines. Well I beg to differ.

My brand new site, “Hey Dude Where’s My Site“, went online this past Thursday. I didn’t submit it to Google until tonight, when I posted a sitemap.xml file for it using the Google Webmaster tools. Within a half hour, not only were the first couple pages showing up for site:www.HeyDudeWheresMySite.com, but it’s already coming up on the first page of Google for my geo-location based terms.

• affordable SEO services San Francisco # 5 (my blog comes up #4)
• SEO services Marin #5 (my blog is at #6)
• affordable SEO services Marin #1 (my blog is #2)

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Getting Indexed at Google in under week is NOT a big deal.

First, anyone who writes even this simplest of clean web sites with content valid to the SEO work, and who submits their sitemap.xml file through the Google Webmaster Tools program, can have their new web site indexed just as fast, as long as the site does not violate Google’s acceptable site policies as deemed such through the Google system.

I’ve had this same rapid result with every brand new site I have been the manager for over the past couple years.

And as for the position I have - these may or may not remain in their positions.  And because of the narrow focus (Marin and San Francisco based phrases), there’s almost no competition beyond a few thousand pages).

The only sites I link from are my blog and my LinkedIn page so far. I don’t yet have half the pages online that the site will eventually have. So it’s really just a work in progress and I haven’t put in a tiny fraction of the optimization work I will have when I’m done. (Heck, not that Google cares, but I don’t even have my brand new logo on the site yet!)

So it’s just a site in its’ infancy. With just two back-links.

Yet nevertheless it IS in the Google index, and it is already showing up in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

In the early days of the web it was a good policy to hold multiple domain names for one web site for copyright, or domain branding purposes, that’s no longer the case - multiple domain names pointing to the same content is now a negative because it causes perceived duplicate content.

Google determines content and it’s related ranking based upon the unique domain name that information resides within. If two domain names have the same content Google tries to determine which of the two domains is either more authoritative,  or more established. It will then give a higher rank to whichever domain meets their criteria.

The reason for this process is Google’s desire to provide only the most relevant and most authoritative information possible to someone searching for that information.

So when two domain names point at the exact same content in the same location, chaos can ensue. It’s not unusual for some or most of the content to show up in Google under one domain, but have other portions of that content show up under the other domain.

When this occurs, the content and pages that show up under the second domain’s name, that content is discounted at the first, and thus the page ranking and authoritative weight of that first domain is negatively impacted - less content is associated with that domain, less pages.

This holds true whether you have to unique and different domains, such as www.site1.com and www.site2.com or you have site1.mysite.com and site2.mysite.com - Google sees these all as unique domains.

And to a lesser degree, the same problem can occur when you syndicate content - even just one page of information from your site out onto the web at other web sites. Vanessa Fox has a great blog post at her web site that specifically discusses duplicate content issues with syndication, and how you can avoid that problem.

If you have the need to own more than one domain name for copyright or branding ownership reasons, then only one domain name should be the primary. All other domain names should be set up so that they are configured with a 301 permanent redirect applied, pointing toward the primary domain. This allows you to have several domain names, but tells the search engine that only one is the currently accurate location of your content, and thus the authority domain.

Sitemap.xml files - the best way to get into the search engines

CAVEAT - This is a VERY long blog article. You may want to go grab a cup of coffee, your favorite chai tea or a venti sugar free vanilla latte before you sit down to read this article!

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For those of you who don’t know what these are, they are NOT the “old school” Site Maps - a page on your web site that lists links to all the other pages on the site in one place. Instead, a sitemap.xml file is a plain text file that sits next to your site’s viewable pages on the web server, but it’s only seen and used by the search engines. It tells the search engines what pages on your site you want indexed, and it lets them know their order of importance as well as the general frequency by which to re-index those pages.

The great debate

One of the many debated topics in the SEO world is whether a web site even needs a sitemap.xml file, let alone whether you should use this in submitting your site, or that you even need to submit it at all. Some people believe that free site submission is all you need to do - without a sitemap.xml file - leave the work to the search engines and their automated indexing “bots”. Others believe that the web is so prolific (which it is) and search engine indexing “bots” are so good (which they are are not) that if you simply create your web site, eventually it will be found and indexed (which it may, if other sites link to you and if those links don’t have a “no-follow” tag, and if you don’t mind waiting upwards of FOREVER to be indexed!)

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Directly Submitting Your Site - The Options

Currently Google, Yahoo and MSN (as well as all the other search engines) allow you to submit your site for inclusion by one or more various methods

• Search Submit Basic
• Paid Search Inclusion
• Sitemap Submit

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Search Submit Basic

The free search submit systems - where you simply go to a web page at that search engine, and enter the URL of your home page, has been around forever (in Internet Search Engine time). Submitting a site this way means that Google or Yahoo’s, MSN’s or Asks or “Joes Generic Search engine” systems will “eventually” get around to going to that web address and automatically poking around - navigating through the various links you have on the site, trying to determine what pages there are and what to index.

It’s a hit and miss method, and can usually take weeks. Once it’s done, if that automated poking misses some links (for a number of reasons) or scans and indexes pages you may not want indexed, you end up with shoddy results.

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No Guarantee!

Sadly, if you have ever read the fine print at the top search engines (I have as part of my work) you’ll discover that NONE of the top search engines actually guarantee that you’ll be listed, if they ever do get to scanning your site this way.

The following statement can be found at Google’s free search submit page:

“We do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.“

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Site Submit Tools

At this point I need to mention the plethora of tools, software and services (some free, some for a fee) that claim they’ll do the submit work for you. There are many such offerings - Submit Express, FreeWebSubmission, IBusinessPromoter, BlastEngine, INeedHits, and on and on and on…

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Site Submit Tools - Worth the effort?

There’s a couple fundamental reasons that I do not use nor do I trust such solutions. First, every search engine has it’s own rules about how much to include in Page titles, Meta keyword and Meta description fields - many of these submit services try to force only one set within that service’s rules, to everywhere. Others make you fill out two, three or more sets of fields. Well what about my client’s 50 page web site - the one where I or my team spent 30 hours coming up with unique titles, keyword sets and desccriptions foe every page on the site? Do I have to submit all 50 pages separately now through your “we’ll submit it for you” system? Please - save me the agony!

In my experience (yours may vary), I would prefer that the search engines come to my client’s sites and take what they need, and leave the rest.

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Site Submit Tools - Submit your site to 5,000 search engines for free!

Next, many of these solution providers claim they’ll submit your site to 100, 1,000 or even 5,000 search engines and directories. WOW - you’ll send my site info to 5,000 places, for free? That’s GREAT! I don’t have to do a thing and my site will become famous overnight! YAY!

NOT.

Now, I don’t have any problems with “Jacinda Jones Search Engine” or “Petey’s little Web Directory” wanting to exist or even maybe some day overtaking Google as the number one source for web site listings. Really - this is what the Internet should be all about. Except I happen to know for a fact that many web sites that claim to be search engines or web directories are really cloaked money machines - set up really for the purpose of loading their site up with AdSense ads or so they can charge for inclusion. If a web site’s primary purpose is either of these, that’s a BAD thing - Google may even penalize your web site for being listed there!

SO again, personally, I would prefer to avoid the aggravation and the potential harm. You are, of course, free to use such services, at your own peril. I don’t have that luxury because I have a responsibility to my business web clients - legitimate business owners who desperately need to do all the positive things they can to compete in today’s Internet, without the risks that come with such services.

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Paid Search Inclusion -Guaranteed

Some search engines, like Yahoo, offer you the ability to pay them for the privilege of being found in their search engine. Yes, that’s right - pay a one-time fee (or a one-time set up fee and an annual inclusion fee) and they might scan your site sooner, or maybe even actually index your site sooner.

HUH? Maybe? Might? Yes that’s correct. Yahoo “guarantees” that if you pay them, you’ll be indexed AND included. Except.

Except if your site doesn’t meet one or more of their twenty three (23) guidelines for non-inclusion. That’s right, they want to ensure that only worthwhile sites get indexed. A lofty goal. Except it’s murky - a gray area issue - and open to interpretation. So what if you are 100% sure you have a valid, legitimate site worthy of inclusion (based on your beliefs)? You don’t have to worry then - right?

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Wrong.

I manage hundreds of web sites. Through my and my teams efforts, many of them come up on the first page of organic rankings at Google. Most of those same sites also come up on the first page at Yahoo and MSN as well. Except one site. That one site comes up on the first page of Google for over three dozen keyword phrases (we’ve done a LOT of work to get those results). So where does it come up in Yahoo? No-where. (The site IS indexed, but it does NOT come up in a search for ANY of those phrases. - Hasn’t for over a year.) Why? Because before I inherited the site, it was banned from Yahoo. One or more of those guidelines had been violated, apparently. I wrote email after email, made phone call after phone call, re-worked the entire site top to bottom to try and comply with those “gray” guidelines. (No, it’s not a porn site - no adult content at all actually - no profanity, no defamation of anyone, etc etc etc)…

The last paragraph on the Yahoo Search Submit page states:

Treatment of Paid Content

Yahoo! designed its Search Submit programs to improve the quality of its search databases and thereby enhance the search user experience. Therefore, URLs submitted via such programs are subject to these guidelines and any other additional guidelines or policies adopted by Yahoo! from time to time.

Note in that last sentence: “and any other additional guidelines or policies adapted by Yahoo! from time to time.”

That means that just because Yahoo offers a “Guaranteed” result, even their own Paid Submission page states that they can not guarantee they will place your site in the search engine. And that they can make up the rules as they go! So why pay for a service when you can get the work done without paying a fee - that way, if your site is acceptable it will be listed - and you’ve saved $49 per page submitted (yes they are willing to charge you for every page you want them to list!)

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Sitemap Submit - The best approach

So let’s say you have a web site - legitimate, professional, and well designed. Before you built the site or had it built, you read all my articles on SEO and you read (and implemented) all the guidelines from my white hat SEO fundamentals page.

Once the site is complete, I highly recommend you create a sitemap.xml file. Don’t worry if you’ve never created an XML file in your life - it’s not really difficult if you follow the method I show below. Or, there are many programs and web sites that will generate a sitemap.xml file for you for free or a fee.

I personally prefer not to use such services because they can sometimes generate entries to pages you don’t want to include (like links to 3rd party web sites, which should never be included!), or I’ve even seen a situation where one service actually generated a sitemap.xml file using improper coding. As an example of this, I ran my own blog site through one of these generators, and it listed one page five times!

So for me, as important as this step in the process is, if you just follow the sample I provide, you’ll be set.

If you’re still not sure about how to do it, or completely confused, you can hire a professional, but don’t be surprised if that “professional” uses one of those web based services or programs, or charges you an arm and a leg. If you’ve got a 50 page web site that’s three layers deep, it might be worth the fee - a choice you’ll need to make. We generate sitemap.xml files for our clients all the time - and it typically takes anywhere from 10 minutes upwards of a half hour at most.

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Creating a sitemap.xml file

First, like any HTML type page, this has to be created in a plain text editor. Don’t try to use MS Word or another word processing program - they stick odd hidden formatting code in files that causes problems on the web! So SimpleText, or NotePad, will work fine. If you know DreamWeaver, you can create the file as long as you use DreamWeaver’s Code view.

Here’s the structure:

The first line of code informs the search engines that this is an XML file and how to read it.

The next line is the opening of the “URLSET” - meaning that from this point forward, until this tag is closed (with the </urlset> line), everything in between is information about one group of URLs - or one web site.

Note then how I have four web pages listed. Each one is within it’s own “url” tag.

The actual web address (url) for each page is identified between the “location” (loc) tags.

The “changefreq” line informs the search engine how often this page is expected to change. (Don’t worry - this is only an approximation - if your pages change more frequently or less, it’s not a bad thing - not all search engines will make use of this information, and those that do (for now) will use it as a general guide).

The “priority” reference is supposed to inform the search engine how relatively important this page is compared to a search someone does. So for example, if you want to list your Contact page in the file, but would prefer people find your home page, then the home page would have a priority of 1.0 and the contact page would perhaps be given a priority of 0.5

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Again though, this is all as a general guideline. And you can always come back at a later date and revise the file. But it’s more important to perform thorough SEO work on the pages, than it is to worry whether you should rate a page at 0.7 or 0.9 for priority. If you’re not sure, just rate them all at 1.0 and let the search engines do the rest.

So the above code image is just an example. Your site might have five entries, or it might have fifty.

How do you know how many it will need? Simple. Go to your web site. When you get to the home page, that’s the first entry. Then click on every link on your site that you want to be sure will be indexed at the search engines. Copy the web address that comes up in the web address field of your browser for each one.

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CUSTOM URL’s - Shopping Carts, Member Areas, and odd information in the URL line..

What if you own a web store - a shopping cart system? And let’s say that if you click on the category link, then click down into an individual product. The URL might end up looking like this:

http://www.mysite.com/shop/cat=3&pid=908394&la=de&da=whatnot

The search engines used to choke on this kind of web page reference (and some still do!) The good news is that Google knows how to handle that - so if you really feel that you have to have that page indexed at Google, then go ahead and put that page in the sitemap.xml file.

Of course, if you build (or have the site built) properly, and if all you do is include the top five pages in your sitemap.xml file, when the search engines do go about their automated indexing, those other pages will eventually end up being indexed anyhow. So it’s most vital that at the very least, you include the top pages for your site.

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Checking the validity of the file

Okay so once you think you’ve got the file created. Save the file as a plain text file and be sure that you name it exactly as sitemap.xml

Once you’ve saved it, open the file in Firefox or Internet Explorer on the PC or Firefox on a Mac. If you’ve done your work properly, it will look something like this:

Ignore that gray box - a sitemap.xml file is not supposed to have any style information associated with it!

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If you made a mistake - like leaving out that </urlset> tag, you will see something like this:

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or that same bad file seen in Firefox

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So the goal is to actually be able to see the file from inside your browser and have it look like it does in your text editor.

If you need more information, or if you really want to get into the nitty gritty of what can go into a sitemap.xml file, and if you’re really geeky, check out Google’s in depth sitemap.xml instruction page on the sitemap protocol.

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OK - NOW WHAT?- Time to post the file to your web site.

Once you’re pretty sure you did it right, you need to get the file up on your web server - the computer where your web site is located. And it has to be placed in the same location (folder) as your site’s home page.

If you have file transfer access (FTP) to your web site, you can upload the file yourself. - It should go in the same place as your site index (index.html or index.php or index.cfm or whatever the main site index is).

If you do not have FTP access, contact your web host and explain that you need them to put it there for you. If they tell you your site already HAS a sitemap.xml file - GREAT! - but don’t believe them! I have personally dealt with professional web hosting companies that claimed this and when I checked I found they were lying!

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How do you check to be sure the file is there?

Go to http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml - in Firefox or Internet Explorer. If it’s there, you will see it exactly as I showed you how you’d see it if you looked at it in your web browser on your local computer!

If you get a “404 page not found” error, or if you simply get “redirected” to your site’s home page, or anywhere but that file, it’s not in the right place.

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Okay - so I have the file there, now how do I tell Google it’s there?

I could write sixteen articles on how to use Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer - so I’ll leave the details for those to another few lessons. For the purposes of this article, I’ll provide the links to those sites.

Whatever you do though, if you’ve come this far, you can definitely get through the Google Webmaster Tools environment and the Yahoo Site Explorer environment - just be patient and take your time! (or send me an email asking for help!)

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The most important thing here is that if you do this properly, once you submit your sitemap.xml file to Google and Yahoo for inclusion (at no charge!) you can expect to see your site indexed within anywhere from a couple days to up to a week, at most! That’s weeks or months faster than any other free method, and less expensive than the slew of fee based services that aren’t so great anyhow!

Google Webmaster Tools

Note - With Google, you should first sign up for their webmaster tools program then submit your site. You get a lot more services along with it, it’s all free, and it’s great (although lately their site verify service has been having major glitches. - note that you do NOT have to verify your site to submit the sitemap.xml file - verifying your site lets them show you statistics and report errors on your site to you but if their own verify system isn’t working it can be very annoying and confusing! - so initially just use their system to submit the sitemap.xml file. Then if you want later, you can experiment and explore the verify service.

Yahoo Site Explorer Program

Note - with Yahoo - on the link above, you’ll see a bot on the right side for submitting your url or “feed” in this case, the “Feed” is your sitemap.xml file - so put your link in there (http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml)

As soon as you click the button to “add my site” you’ll have to sign into Yahoo (or create an account). It can be quite annoying if you’re not paying attention but well worth the few minutes it takes.

Again, if you get lost on any of this, please contact me and I’ll be happy to do what I can to help!

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A word about robots.txt files

I will devote another article to the importance of robots.txt files (another plain text file that sits at your web site next to the index page and your sitemap.xml file) - but need to mention that all web sites should definitely have robots.txt files as well. If you want more info on them now, check out the wiki entry for them at wikipedia.

Alan

One of the more challenging aspects of building your web site’s search engine ranking is the process of obtaining enough links back to your site that Google and the other top search engines deem valuable.

Quality vs. Quantity

The more high quality links back to your site from other sites, the more your site is considered important, authoritative, and relevant. Why does it matter how many other people link back to my site? Well let’s say you have a site that has the exact same quality content as your biggest competitor, they were built around the same time, and they’ve both got world class SEO implemented throughout, using identical keyword phrases in all the right ways - how is Google supposed to determine whether your site is more relevant then your competitors?

They do it by looking to see the links back - if there are 1,000 web sites that have links coming back to your competitor’s site but only five coming back to yours, Google sees this as an indication that more people consider your competitor’s site as important and valuable, thus more relevant to someone searching for what you offer.

Even though back-links are not the number one most important criteria for quality results in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), they can have so much weight when achieved properly that some of the on-site SEO work you might have otherwise needed to perform becomes less important.

Unfortunately, it can often take years and countless hours finding ways to get other web site owners to provide a link back to your site. Or your competitor might have an “in” with a really popular web site and can get links back from them but you can’t (and this is a problem then because having one link back from a hugely popular web site can result in much more value than having links back from dozens of less popular web sites!).

Another factor - if you have a link back from CNN.com, that’s worth more than a link back from “Mary’s personal page of links”.  Because CNN.com itself is considered an authoritative site.

Also, if a link comes back from a web site that is related to your site in some significant way (similar market focus, similar keyword phrases) the more weight that link will be than if it comes from a site where the focus is completely different than yours.

So what’s an honest small or mid-size business owner left to do? How do we overcome the time and cost factors?

The Power of PR -The Fastest Way to a potential Plethora of links

Traditional media marketing experts pretty much all agree that good PR is worth ten times its weight in advertising. Public Relations (PR) in the traditional sense, consists of a whole host of methods, strategies and techniques for getting your brand, your offerings in front of your target market. Web PR can be boiled down to just a few key strategies, the most direct and potentially most valuable being Press Releases.

PR for Web 2.0

Press Releases traditionally involve hiring a PR specialist, having a well written release created, and paying them to distribute your release to all the “right” media outlets. Then it’s a matter of sitting back and hoping - waiting and hoping that the powers that be in those media outlets think your story is worthy of their ability to get your release out into the world.

Well, I’ve got news for you! PR is no longer the sacred cow (no offense to anyone who views cows as being sacred) that it once was. Thanks to the evolution of the Internet, there are a number of Press Release distribution services that offer the same or even more powerful services - and the best by far, in my experience, is PRWeb.

PRWeb.com offers four levels of press release submission:

• Standard visibility
• Social Media visibility
• SEO visibility
• Media visibility

Because this blog is about search engine optimization, and because my primary role in consulting with web clients regarding site promotion relates to online marketing as it relates to SEO, I always recommend clients go with either the SEO visibility (currently $200) or Media visibility (currently $360) levels. While you may think $200 - $360 is a lot of money, if you use the PRWeb release submission service and properly seed your release for SEO value, both in accordance with white hat SEO fundamentals as well as through the plethora of SEO related options they offer, within just a couple days of submitting your release you can potentially see hundreds of new links back to your web site!

If you don’t have the time or energy to submit the release yourself and do so while implementing proper SEO techniques, you can pay the PRWeb staff to do the work for you. Personally I always do all the work, but that’s because my clients pay us for our time and expertise.

The Link Building Magic of Press Releases

So how can a press release get you all those links back to your site? Well, at the top Media Visibility level, your release is going to be submitted on your behalf to all the top news services that matter - the AP Wire service, google Alerts, and Yahoo Alerts for example. And just think of how many news related web sites automatically display content that comes from the AP wire service? How many blogs and topic-specific web sites have news feeds built into them that display those press releases? A LOT! So every time a web site pulls news feeds within the topic or topics you designate in the release submission process, it’s going to get your press releases!

Going Stale - Long Term Repetition

While some web sites will retain news feeds indefinitely, many will automatically archive or delete older feeds from time to time. In my experience, I’ve seen the value of a press release maintain itself with the majority of links for several months, then begin to taper off, and ultimately, most of those links will disappear. So it’s important to submit a new press release every few months at the very least

Results will vary

Exactly how many back links you obtain as a result of this method will depend greatly on several factors. How “hot” are the topics or categories you associate to that release? How news worthy is your message? There’s really no way in advance to know exactly how many links you’ll get regardless of the categories (always associate your release with as many categories as you can legitimately do) that your release fits. Yet it’s definitely worth the effort.

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At WebSight Design, Inc., we manage the search engine optimization and search marketing initiatives for many clients, big and small. Quite often we inherit web sites built by someone else, and most of the time when that happens, I almost cringe at the keywords and page titles used. Too often someone didn’t understand the importance of properly selecting the best possible keywords or properly seeding page titles and meta tags for search optimization.

LESSON 1
PAGE TITLES AND META TAGS

Keyword selection is VERY important nowadays - how you choose the keywords, and how you apply them on the site needs to be done in accordance with the current methods by which Google and Yahoo evaluate the importance of those keywords as they relate to the descriptions and the text on the page they are embedded, as all are then related to the actual search phrase used to find the information.

Here’s some very important rules to go by when choosing keywords and implementing them:

1.THE BEST KEYWORD PHRASES
The most frequently searched phrase is not always the best. For example, if 25,000 people searched using the word “map” and only 500 people searched using the words “map of Houston” then you are much better off using “map of Houston” because it’s a more refined qualifier - just getting tens of thousands of site visitors is not the goal - getting qualified visitors is. (See my page on White Hat SEO to learn more about how to choose the best key word phrases.)

2. SEEDING KEYEWORDS IN THE META TAGS AND TITLE

a) PAGE TITLE
the most important “off-page” element is the page title. You should always include the company name in the page title, followed by the top three, four or five keyword phrases FOR THAT PAGE. This is very important to understand - just stuffing any keywords in the title tag is useless if those same phrases are not the primary focus for that page. Never have any single word repeated more than THREE times in the page title. SO if you have Houston Map | Texas Map | Harris County Map then you have the word “Map” three times.

The best way to put a title on a page is to have the company name, followed by the top phrases for that page, separated by the “pipe” symbol like this:
Key Maps, Inc. | Houston Map | Texas Map | Harris County Map

Note how the word Map appears 3 times and the word Maps appears 1 time in my example - this is okay.

The reason we use the pipe symbol is commas and other special characters can confuse some search engines and the pipe symbol gives visual clarity to someone looking at your listing in the search engines.

There are some people who say the Title should never be more than 65 characters long, or less. This is not true, however some search engines will only display the first 65 characters.

For some of my sites, Google displays up to 68 including spaces.

And Yahoo displays up to 118

So the most important phrases are all that should be in the title, but you can go up to 100 characters or more if you need to (the tail end just won’t show up to a search results page).

b) META KEYWORDS FIELD
Google no longer uses this field, but Yahoo and other search engines do! My policy is to just take the exact words in their exact order from the page title, and put that into the Meta keywords field but replace that “pipe” symbol with commas. That’s all there is to it. Never put a comma between two or more words in a single phrase - so the phrase Houston Maps should not be “Houston,Maps” because this tells the search engines that these are two separate phrases!

c) META DESCRIPTION
This should be a descriptive paragraph up to 200 characters including spaces.  Some search engines will only display the first 150 characters so you may want to stick to that limit, or at least get the most important content in that portion.

You can have your keywords for that page in the description, however it is most important to remember what this element is for…

When someone does a search, and they see your listing in the results, you’ll see either that page’s Meta Description field, or just what appears to be some text that’s extracted from the page itself.  If you write a well formatted natural sounding Meta description, it’s more likely that this is what you’ll see on the search results page.  So the best practice here is to write something that will motivate that person to click on your link instead of someone elses…

If you do include any of the keyword phrases in your description, they don’t have to be in the same sequence as the Title tag - again - it’s about what sounds the most natural and enticing, or what you think will draw that click.

(Personal admission - for a long time, I insisted in the practice of getting every phrase into a description field.  And many of my client sites still have those.  Google sometimes shows those, and sometimes not.  Since the description field apparently doesn’t affect our client’s rankings at Google, and those clients all have great click-through rates, I haven’t gone back to change those just for the sake of doing it…)

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