Search Engines

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Sitemap for WordPress Plugin Update

December 27, 2009 in Code, Search Engines | No comments

Grab the updated plugin for  Google XML Sitemaps by Arne version 3.3.3, which now allows you to include non-WordPress pages on your site to be part of the sitemap for your web site. This is a great addition to the update, previously i had to hard code in pages that where not part of the WordPress infrastructure and each time you changed WordPress content you had to redo the sitemap again.

For a refresh on the previous post on Sitemaps check it out here.

Once in the plug in settings, go to the ‘additional pages’ section and add in your non WordPress URL and select a change frequency time,one last note is that if your blog is not your root directory but something like http://myurl.com/blog/ then once the sitemap is built in the blog directory you need to moved it up to the root directory.

sitemap-wordpress-plugin

sitemap-wordpress-plugin

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Lost in the Serps

December 7, 2009 in SEO Tips, SEO Tools, Search Engines | No comments

How do you find what page your site is ranked or listed on in the Google SERPS?

Well you can do some painstaking trawling through the search result pages and if you’re lower ranked that’s going to take some time and you might even miss it, with a Firefox plug in and a script you can let Google take you there in a click, which is very nice. Read the rest of this entry »

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Special Search Suggestabox!

November 30, 2009 in SEO Techniques, SEO Tips, SEO Tools, Search Engines | No comments

C’mon People – Suggestabox!

You can use certain commands when searching to find out some relevant details about a web site, here are some of the useful ones, these can be especially helpful in analysing your site and your competitors:

site:yourwebsite.com - This will show you a list of all the indexed pages with the search engine

link:yourwebsite.com – This shows a list of all the inbound or baclinks to the web site

allintitle:your title words here – This will show you a list of sites that use all of the keywords you specify in the page title

intitle:keyword – This will show you a list of websites that are using your keyword in the title

allintext:your keywords here – This will show you a list of sites that use all of the keywords you specify in the text

intext:keyword - This will show you a list of websites that are using your keyword in the text

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Along Came A Spider

November 28, 2009 in Search Engines

Crawlers, bots and spiders are  those critters that come along when you least expect or you can’t wait ’til they show up uninvited. Once they come and visit and check out your goods they will make a note and come back.

You can identify the bots by looking in your web logs and will discover that the big 3 are:

Google – Googlebot
Yahoo – Yahoo Slurp
Bing – MSNbot (wondering if they’ll change that soon, like Bingbot)

Read the rest of this entry »

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Webmasters Unite

November 19, 2009 in SEO Tips, Search Engines | No comments

The 3 logins to master your density:

Yahoo

Bing

Google

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Everything You Wanted To Know About Sitemaps But Where To Afraid To Ask

November 17, 2009 in Code, SEO Tips, Search Engines | No comments

I used to think maintaining a sitemap was a royal pain before you could do it automatically with a range of tools. Sitemaps can have a visual html appearance so your visitors can get an overall look of your site and click through to the pages from there. But more importantly they are needed to help the search engines do their job properly of finding your pages and sticking you in their index.
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Google Analytics

November 15, 2009 in Search Engines | No comments

Google Analytics is a powerful tracking application to measure all your website traffic, you are going to need it to see whats going on in your site, sign up here, its free as long as you don’t exceed 5 million pageviews a month.

Create a new account at Google add your URL and you will be given the choice to add code or upload a verification file to your site, this will let Google know that you are the site’s owner and then will start reporting all the stats you will ever care about.

All the doco stuff is here, happy reading.

For WordPress users there is a plug in – from my Dutch friend. This will do all the work for you but you still need an account with Google, add your site and then you will get your analytics user ID which you then insert into the WordPress plugin.

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All the Rest

November 15, 2009 in Search Engine Submission, Search Engines | No comments

You will not need to submit links to any other search engines, that battle has been fought, all the others feed into the big three; Yahoo, Google and Bing – here is a link to show how the search engine relationship chart exists – so after submission you need to sit and wait until you get indexed – there are a couple of other things to do while you wait, getting sorted with analytics and sitemaps and robots; has to be something from a John Carpenter film.

Indexing is a wait and see scenario there is no fixed time that the search engines will inde you, it can well vary between a couple of days to a couple of months, one thing that will help is if another site already indexed has a link to yours.

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Manual Submits to Search Engines Part 2

November 15, 2009 in Search Engine Submission, Search Engines | No comments

Ok, couple more manual submits, for Yahoo go here and for the Open Directory Project aka DMOZ go here, for DMOZ a real person is going to check you out so make sure you are who you say you are! You will have to sift through the directory and select an appropriate category, please note that not all categories have a “suggest URL”, if your’s doesn’t have one you will need to select another category.

Yahoo also has a Directory which you can list your business which is reviewed by a real live person, you can do this here but it will come at a cost of $299 (non-refundable).

To pay this sort of money at the start i feel is really not worth it especially that the submission at Google is free and will give you a lot more search results considering they dominate the search engine landscape.

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Manual Submits to Search Engines

November 14, 2009 in Search Engine Submission, Search Engines | No comments

To manually submit your new site to a search engine you can do Bing here and Google here,  i have heard that doing this sometimes makes the process take longer but haven’t heard why? Look forward to any comments on this.

Will discuss Yahoo and Open Directory in a future post but these 2 are the more important starting points.

Actually it is preffered to get your site up to SEO scratch before you do this as then you will get indexed correctly at the start – rather than waiting for a re-index.

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