SEO Best Practices: Make Your URLs “Pretty”

photo credit: Bekathwia

As I said in the previous post in this series, a lot of what used to be regarded as very potent SEO magic simply doesn’t have the same impact it did even a few short years ago.  For example, Google now completely ignores the keywords meta tag because it has been abused to the point of being totally useless.  Instead of paying attention to gimmicks, search engines are focusing on getting better at analyzing the real content of a page as well as in the quality of the incoming links to that page.

So, now that your hopes of gaming Google have been thoroughly dashed, let me explain how URL formatting is still valuable and why you ought to make your URLs as pretty as possible.

Humans Read These Things

Generally it’s a good idea to stop thinking about machine and start thinking about people whenever you’re doing something to your site, this is especially important with URLs.  Take the Google Webmaster Central blog link above, when hovering over that link and seeing the URL it leads to, users can make a pretty reasonable assumption about the content of the page they’ll be lead to by clicking on the link.  That’s because the URL contains all the information you need to know about the content of the page:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

That link tells you not only the domain of the site, but also the date of the post (so you can tell if it’s still relevant), as well as the title of the post.  Imagine if the same page had this URL format:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/blogs.aspx?id=5460879298

What does that tell you about the content?  Nothing.  In fact, it’s sort of scary looking.  There’s no “click appeal” to this sort of URL.

This logic extends beyond just hovering over links in the browser.  It also applies to links copied into emails and links copied into social networking and bookmarking services.

The SEO impact happens when your nice, pretty URLs encourage people to link to you more often.  Incoming links are one of the most surefire ways to boost your rankings in search engines, so anything you can do to make more links happen more often, is worth considering.

The Effort is Minimal

Why not put in the effort to make your URLs pretty and comprehensible by people when most content management systems (CMS) have pretty URL options built-in so that changing them is literally a few clicks away.

WordPress’s “Day and name” permalink option can be implemented in about 4 clicks in addition to changing your .htaccess permissions using your FTP client.  More can be found at the Codex (the WordPress bible).

Similarly with Drupal and Joomla, the effort needed to make your URLs a little nicer and friendlier should be less than an hours work.

The Importance of Being Earnest in URLs

Some folks suggest that including information such as dates in URLs is a bad thing.  These opponents of including dates in URLs claim that dates are both irrelevant information and give the appearance of content being “stale.”  But of course both of these things can’t be true.  If a post’s being “stale” matters to a search engine user, then dates are relevant and should be included in URLs.

In general, whenever an SEO expert is telling you to make something appear to be something it isn’t or to obfuscate what a piece of content really is, they’re selling you useless advice.  The entire point of SEO is to make content that users want to find more findable.  Serving up pages that are either dated, unrelated, or little more than a series of affiliate marketing ads doesn’t accomplish that and hurts everyone’s experience online.

Bottom line, users respect sites that are open about what their content is, not sites that play games with their content.  If you want to create a loyal following of readers and grow your brand, concentrate on regularly producing good content, not page-view-boosting shenanigans.

There’s Still Some Impact on Search

Last and very much least, URL structure still has some impact on search engine ranking, moreso with Bing and Yahoo! than the more savvy and well-equipped Google, but it does matter.  Having dates and keywords displayed in URLs gives both of those items weight and will help to make sure that your most up-to-date and relevant information is served up to potential visitors.

Plugin Monday: MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer

photo credit: jbcurio

As I’ve said in previous posts, update services or “pinging” services are an important features of all blogs and you should take advantage of as many of them as you can find (ReadyMadeWeb’s list contains just over 240 update services).  Yet, if you find yourself frequently editing published posts, you may be harming your blogs digital reputation.

Updates and corrections, so long as they’re properly noted, are very good things—as the adage goes “To Err Is Human, To Correct Divine.”  However, WordPress sends a new ping to all of the update services contained in in the Writing sub-menu of the Setting tab every time you post a correction.  Those update services may interpret this repeated submission of the same post as spamming and permanently ban your site.

You can avoid this by using a plugins like MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer. This plugin replaces the built-in Update Services function in WordPress with its own version that gives you greater control and reduces your chances of being branded a spammer.

The plugin is very easy to install, works with all versions of WordPress above 2.0, and couldn’t be simpler to use. Here’s a screen shot of the setting page:

So, that’s it!  It’s a pretty straight-forward install and setup.  If you’re still not convinced this plugin is worth the effort, read the write-up over at MaxBlogPress, they believe pretty fervently that the default settings in WordPress will get you banned from many update services and put you at a real disadvantage.

Google Releases New Analytics API Features

Google has released a whole bunch of changes to the Analytics API such as access to advanced segments, goal-related data,  and custom variables, along with several other new features.  It’s worth checking out all the changes over at the Google Analytics Blog.

SEO Best Practices: Title Tags

photo credit: mmatins

Most “SEO Experts” will try to convince you that only they have the magic mojo to make your website a high-traffic success, which is why they’re entitled to gobs of your hard-earned cash.  Unfortunately a lot of what these consultants do amounts to little more than digital trickery—payed links, keyword gaming, micro-sites setup for the sole purpose of linking to your site, and other shenanigans that hurt everyone’s online experience by filling the web with links to things in which users are seldom interested.

Thankfully, search engines have gotten a lot better in recent years so that the mojo peddled by these modern-day snake oil salesman no longer works, or at least is much less effective.  So, instead of hiring some dude who has his photo slathered all over his website that is otherwise brimming with generic clip art and bold red letters, you can just follow a few simple best practices that will help people who are actually interested in your content to find it.

The easiest way to start optimizing your set for better search results is to start considering the titles of individual pages.  This is a far cry from the tricks and tips the self-proclaimed “gurus” might provide, but it really works.  In fact, seomoz.org, one of the leading blogs dedicated to the topic of SEO, ranked title tags among the top 5 factors for determining search engine rankings in a survey of SEO professionals.

Of course, perhaps this isn’t the best evidence to present after dismissing the opinions of anyone proclaiming to be an expert on SEO.  So let’s go straight to the source and see what the folks at the Google Webmaster Blog have to say about page titles.  In a post from October 2006 entitled “Target visitors or search engines?” Google’s true gurus say:

Whenever possible, ensure each page has a unique title that describes the page well. For instance, if your site is for your store “Buffy’s House of Sofas”, a visitor may want to bookmark your home page and the order page for your red, fluffy sofa. If all of your pages have the same title: “Wecome to my site!”, then a visitor will have trouble finding your site again in the bookmarks. However, if your home page has the title “Buffy’s House of Sofas” and your red sofa page has the title “Buffy’s red fluffy sofa”, then visitors can glance at the title to see what it’s about and can easily find it in the bookmarks later. And if your visitors are anything like me, they may have several browser tabs open and appreciate descriptive titles for easier navigation.

This simple tip for visitors helps search engines too. Search engines index pages based on the words contained in them, and including descriptive titles helps search engines know what the pages are about. And search engines often use a page’s title in the search results. “Welcome to my site” may not entice searchers to click on your site in the results quite so much as “Buffy’s House of Sofas”.

So what does that all mean?  To put it a bit more simply, titles matter because human beings read them and will click on them if they’re short, descriptive, and comprehensible.  They also matter because search engines read them and use them as a means to determine what sort of content a web page contains.  This all boils down to some simple rules for titles.  Make sure all of your page titles:

1. Accurately describe the content of the page
2. Contain the important keywords from the page—use “Obama” instead of “The President” or “Google” instead of “Popular Search Engine”
3. Are completely unique—don’t have a series of posts all named “Daily Links”
4. Are 70 characters max

This post is the first of an ongoing series on SEO best practices.  As more posts are added to the series they will appear both on this post’s page and at http://readymadeweb.com/series/seo-best-practices.

Speed Matters: Use PageSpeed & YSlow to Streamline Your Site

photo credit: f.svehla

As tech writers like PC World’s Juan Carlos Perez and Chris Crum of WebProNews among others have noted, the monolith of Mountain View, the all-powerful Google has become obsessed with speed, which means you should be too.

Google has been obsessing over making its own search results faster, making browsers faster by introducing Chrome, and as Mr. Crum points out in the article linked to above, may be making the speed of your site a factor in search ranking.

Thankfully, Google has provided us with a tool to see why your web pages are so damned slow.  Check out PageSpeed, a Firefox addon.  It requires FireBug, which you should already have in your toolkit—it’s indispensable for bug fixing and for reverse-engineering someone else’s code, like you might do when customizing a WordPress theme.

Yahoo! has also released a Firefox addon that also runs in conjunction with FireBug. YSlow will give you a second opinion on what’s slowing you down and how to speed your site up.

For more on optimizing your site, visit http://code.google.com/speed/ which provides oodles of resources on how to make your site speedier.

242 Ways to Ping: How to Stay on Search Engine Radar

photo credit: loop_oh

If you’re running a WordPress blog, you may not know that there’s a really simple way for you quickly generate more traffic without changing how much you’re writing, paying for advertising, or implementing some complicated SEO trickery.  Instead, you can use “Update Services” a feature found in the “Writing” sub-menu under the “Settings” tab.

Update services are used by search engines to keep their directories up to date.  By telling WordPress which update services it should be talking to—often referred to as “pinging”—you’ll ensure that search engines are aware of updates to your blog the instant they happen.

When you launch a WordPress site, the setup menu will ask if you want your blog visible to sites like Technorati or Google.  If you selected “Yet” (which you should have), WordPress should already have one service listed in the Update Services box:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

ReadyMadeWeb has put together this list of 242 update services, listed below ( and also available at Google Documents), that your WordPress blog can ping.  Though this is a long list, there is no significant reason not to use all of these services.  The only downside you may encounter is an increased post time—as in the time in between clicking “Publish” or “Update Post” and have the update go through, will be a couple second longer.

• http://api.moreover.com/ping
• http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
• http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
• http://cullect.com/feed/ping
• http://ping.bitacoras.com
• http://ping.feedburner.com
• http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
• http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
• http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
• http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
• http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
• http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
• http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
• http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
• http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
• http://www.wasalive.com/ping/
• http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
• http://blogping.unidatum.com/RPC2/
• http://1470.net/api/ping
• http://api.feedster.com/ping
• http://api.feedster.com/ping.php
• http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
• http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
• http://bblog.com/ping.php
• http://bitacoras.net/ping
• http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
• http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
• http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
• http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
• http://coreblog.org/ping/
• http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
• https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/pingPodcast
• http://ping.amagle.com/
• http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
• http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
• http://ping.blo.gs/
• http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
• http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc/
• http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
• http://ping.myblog.jp
• http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
• http://pingqueue.com/rpc/
• http://ping.blogg.de/
• http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
• http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
• http://ping.weblogs.se/
• http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
• http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
• http://rpc.britblog.com/
• http://rpc.newsgator.com/
• http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2
• http://rpc.wpkeys.com/
• http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx
• http://signup.alerts.msn.com/alerts-PREP/submitPingExtended.doz
• http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
• http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
• http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
• http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
• http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
• http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
• http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
• http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
• http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
• http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
• http://www.imblogs.net/ping/
• http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
• http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
• http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
• http://www.rssfwd.com/xmlrpc/api
• http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
• http://xmlrpc.blogg.de
• http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
• http://a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
• http://api.mw.net.tw/RPC2
• http://blog.with2.net/ping.php
• http://blogbot.dk/io/xml-rpc.php
• http://blogdigger.com/RPC2
• http://blogoole.com/ping
• http://blogoon.net/ping
• http://blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
• http://blogsdominicanos.com/ping
• http://blogsearch.google.ae/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.at/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.be/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.bg/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.ca/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.ch/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.cl/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.co.cr/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.co.hu/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.co.id/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.co.il/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.co.in/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.co.it/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.co.jp/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.co.ma/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.co.nz/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.co.th/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.co.uk/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.co.uk/pingRPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.co.ve/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.co.za/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.com.ar/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.com.au/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.com.br/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.com.co/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.com.do/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.com.mx/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.com.my/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.com.pe/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.com.sa/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.com.sg/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.com.tr/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.com.tw/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.com.ua/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.com.uy/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.com.vn/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.de/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.es/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.fi/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.fr/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.gr/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.hr/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.ie/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.in/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.it/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.jp/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.lt/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.nl/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.pl/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.pt/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.ro/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.ru/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.se/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.sk/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.tw/ping/RPC2
• http://blogsearch.google.us/ping/RPC2
• http://blogshares.com/rpc.php
• http://blogsnow.com/ping
• http://blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
• http://catapings.com/ping.php
• http://effbot.org/rpc/ping.cgi
• http://feedsky.com/api/RPC2
• http://fgiasson.com/pings/ping.php
• http://focuslook.com/ping
• http://holycowdude.com/rpc/ping
• http://imblogs.net/ping
• http://j-ranking.com/ping.cgi
• http://lasermemory.com/lsrpc
• http://mod-pubsub.org/ping.php
• http://newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
• http://newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
• http://ping.amagle.com
• http://ping.blogg.de
• http://ping.blogoon.net/
• http://ping.blogs.yandex.ru/RPC2
• http://ping.fakapster.com/rpc
• http://ping.fc2.com/
• http://ping.gpost.info/xmlrpc
• http://ping.kutsulog.net/
• http://ping.namaan.net/rpc
• http://ping.speenee.com/xmlrpc
• http://ping.weblogs.se
• http://ping.wordblog.de
• http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc
• http://pinger.onejavastreet.com
• http://pingqueue.com/rpc
• http://queerfilter.com/ping
• http://r.hatena.ne.jp/rpc
• http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2
• http://rpc.britblog.com
• http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080
• http://rpc.newsgator.com
• http://rpc.reader.livedoor.com/ping
• http://rpc.wpkeys.com
• http://rssfeeds.com/suggest_wizzard.php
• http://rssfwd.com/xmlrpc/api
• http://serenebach.net/rep.cgi
• http://snipsnap.org/RPC2
• http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ping.php
• http://wasalive.com/ping
• http://weblogalot.com/ping
• http://weblogues.com/RPC
• http://xianguo.com/xmlrpc/ping.php
• http://zhuaxia.com/rpc/server.php
• http://blogupdate.org/sverige/ping/
• http://blo.gs/ping.php
• http://ping.feeds.yahoo.com/RPC2/
• http://pingoat.com/
• http://rpc.pingomatic.com
• http://zing.zingfast.com
• http://www.zhuaxia.com/rpc/server.php
• http://www.xianguo.com/xmlrpc/ping.php
• http://www.weblogues.com
• http://www.snipsnap.org
• http://www.popdex.com
• http://www.mod-pubsub.org/ping.php
• http://www.lasermemory.com
• http://www.holycowdude.com/rpc/ping/
• http://www.feedsky.com/api/RPC2
• http://www.catapings.com/ping.php
• http://www.blogsdominicanos.com/ping/
• http://www.blogroots.com
• http://www.blogpeople.net
• http://www.a2b.cc
• http://weblogues.com/RPC/
• http://weblogues.com/ping/
• http://wasalive.com/ping/
• http://topicexchange.com
• http://syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
• http://rpc.twingly.com
• http://rpc.technorati.jp/rpc/ping
• http://rpc.bloggerei.de/ping/
• http://rcs.datashed.net
• http://popdex.com/addsite.php
• http://ping.wordblog.de/
• http://ping.snap.com/ping/RPC2
• http://packetmonster.net/xmlrpc.php
• http://newsblog.jungleboots.org/ping.php
• http://mod-pubsub.org
• http://lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
• http://imblogs.net/ping/
• http://holycowdude.com/rpc/ping/
• http://hamo-search.com/ping.php
• http://bulkfeeds.net
• http://blogupdate.org/ping/
• http://blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
• http://blogpeople.net/ping
• http://blogoon.net/ping/
• http://blogoole.com/ping/
• http://blogdb.jp
• http://blog.goo.ne.jp
• http://bitacoras.net/ping/
• http://bitacoles.net/ping.php
• http://bitacoles.net/notificacio.php
• http://bblog.comping.php
• http://audiorpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
• http://api.my.yahoo.com/ping
• http://api.my.yahoo.co.jp/RPC2
• http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
• http://xping.pubsub.com/ping
• http://blog.youdao.com/ping/RP2

For additional resources on update services, check out the WordPress Codex, which keeps a fairly good list of these services.  You can also find a link to this page on the Writing page of your WordPress installation directly above the Update Services box.

Using the MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer plugin will ping these services only when you post the article not when you edit it—protecting you from getting banned from some update services that penalize for “re-pings” of the same content.  This plugin also allows you to check its “smart-update-pinger.log” file in the wp-content folder to see if any services are refusing ping requests from your site.  You can remove these services to save your server processing time and make your publishing process that much snappier.

How-To: Generate a Sitemap in WordPress

photo credit: koka_sexton

In order to submit your sitemap to search engines and gain all the benefits explain in my earlier post “The Importance of Sitemaps,” you have to have one first.  If you’re using WordPress, then this process is very easy.

There are several plugins for WordPress that will create a sitemap, but my favorite is Google XML Sitemaps created by Arne Brachhold of Kernen im Remstal in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. Though Mr. Brachold’s name and city are difficult for me to pronounce, his plugin is exceptionally easy to use. It’s also very frequently updated—2009 alone saw over 10 updates to the plugin—which means that bugs are frequently being identified and fixed and the plugin is kept up-to-date with changes at Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask.

To install the plugin, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the plugins menu in the back-end of WordPress, click on the Add New sub-menu, and  search for “Google XML Sitemaps.”
2. Google XML Sitemaps should appear at the top of the search list.  Click “Install” and then “Install Now.”
3. WordPress will now ask for your site’s FTP username and password.  If you’ve already used the install/update utility, this information may already be filled in.
4. Once it’s installed, activate the plugin.
5. Next you’ll have to manually create
6. The plugin is set up to create two files, sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz (a zipped file for faster downloading by search engines).  When you first install the plugin, these files will have to be created manually as your installation should be set so that new files cannot be written to the root directory.  To do this simply create two dummy files with the right names, upload them, and set them to CHMOD 666.  For more on this, see this note from the plugin’s creator:
   

   More information about CHMOD and how to make files writable is available at the WordPress Codex and on stadtaus.com. Making your whole blog directory writable is NOT recommended anymore due to security reasons.

7. Now navigate to the plugin’s settings page to manually generate the sitemap for the first time.
8. You’re done!

Google XML Sitemaps will automatically alert Google, Bing, and Yahoo about your new sitemap.  You should see your search engine traffic increase within a few days.

Though this plugin will automatically submit your sitemap, submitting your sitemap manually to Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and even Ask.com and other smaller search engines has many benefits.  You’ll be able to see if your site is being completely indexed, if any broken links are harming your ranking, and a lot of other helpful information that can dramatically improve your position in search results.

Stay tuned to our series of posts on sitemaps to learn how to manually submit your sitemap.

SEO Best Practices: The Importance of Sitemaps

photo credit: magnetbox

Whatever platform you’re using—Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, etc.—it’s vital to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to generate a sitemap and regularly submit it to Google, Bing, and Yahoo!  A sitemap serves as a sort of table of contents for your website.  This table of contents can be submitted to search engines so that each page of your website and their relationship to each other is clearly comprehensible.

Without a sitemap, chances are that search engines don’t know about all the content on your site and don’t see as rapidly as they might otherwise.

This was the case with Mercatus.org until the Mercatus Center launched its new website in late November.  Up until that point, Mercatus had been using a .NET-based CMS called Ektron, which didn’t generate XML sitemaps. During the roughly one year that Mercatus used this CMS, Google indexed roughly 100 pages a day out of the more than 2,500 that make up Mercatus.org.  Even if Google looked at different pages every day, it would take them 25 days to index the entire site at that rate—meaning that few topical, current pieces were ever searchable.

In late November the Mercatus Center launched its new website, a Drupal 6 installation including an XML Sitemap module.  For the first few days after launch, Google only indexed a dozen pages a day.  However, once a handful of days had past, our crawl rate skyrocketed, as evidenced by this graph from Google Webmaster Tools:

You can see that the number of pages crawled (indexed) each day now ranges between 3,000 and 7,200 7,800 (updated 12/22).  This means that the entire site is cataloged by Google at least once a day.  All of this new attention has more than doubled the amount of traffic Mercatus.org gets from Google.

If you’re using a platform that doesn’t support sitemap generation and submission it’s a pretty good indication that the platform you’re using isn’t a good one.  This is such a basic component of building a modern website that it is worth changing platforms in order to have this capability.  ReadyMadeWeb recommends reading the annual Open Source CMS Market Share report by Ric Shreves of Water & Stone to familiarize yourself with the market for modern, standards-based CMS solutions if you’re considering a switch.

The methods for generating and submitting sitemaps vary depending on the CMS you’re using.  ReadyMadeWeb will soon be posting how-to guides on Drupal and WordPress XML sitemaps.

How-To: Grow Your Twitter Followers (Without Hiring a “Guru” and Without Becoming a Spammer)

photo credit: Birdfreak.com

Working in the non-profit world means I deal with a small budget for new media promotion, but I’m still expected to get the Mercatus Center’s research out to as many people as possible.  Twitter has been a great promotions tool because it allows you to find people interested in the topics you write about as well as folks interested in people or groups similar to you.  In other words, Twitter makes it easy to find your audience and to do it quickly.

But to get thousands of quality followers who are really interested in what you’re saying, you’re best off staying away from the dozens of “gurus” out there.  Instead, you can use the simple and nearly free solutions available that can save you time and expose your tweets to a larger and larger audience.

Twitter is a very new phenomenon, so there doesn’t seem to be a single service out there that does everything I need to grow my Twitter accounts—perhaps I will build my own tool eventually.  In the meantime, I use this group of tools to automate my tweets, track the traffic I get from Twitter, and grow my follower numbers:

HootSuite (Free)

This service allows you to schedule tweets, which is crucial as you’re never going to be able to create a routine that allows you to tweet throughout the day.  Instead, figure out what you want to promote, then site down once a day to schedule your tweets so they’ll trickle out throughout the day.  This spacing out of tweets throughout the day is crucial as most Twitter users check their feeds frequently—maybe a handful of time a day.  So, scheduling your Tweets allows  you to always be among the few dozen more recent tweets in most users feeds.

Chris Moody of the Cato Institute insists that loading up the afternoon with tweets is the best strategy as this is when most people are active on Twitter.  This is good advice, but perhaps an even more important take-away from Chris’s experience is that monitoring your tweets is important, which brings us to the next reason to use Hootsuite.

Hoot Suite also offers URL shortening.  This URL shortening—HootSuite uses its ow.ly domain (get it?) as its shortening service—also allows Hootsuite to track all the folks clicking on the links you tweet out into the Twitter community.  This is also critical as website traffic tools like Google Analytics will see any incoming traffic from a cell phone or desktop Twitter client as direct traffic, not traffic from Twitter.com.  This means you could be grossly under estimating how frequently your tweets are converted into traffic for your website because programs TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop along with applications running on the BlackBerry or iPhone don’t register on your tracking software.  I found the Mercatus Center had more than 5 times the conversion rate previously estimated after switching to HootSuite.

Finally, Hootsuite will also allow you to enter in an RSS feed, so new blog posts and other new publications are posted automatically along with a shortened URL link to the post, saving you more time.

I should note, however, that while RSS-to-Twitter tools are a time saver, they may not be the best strategy.  Making your tweets conversational and making sure they highlight the most relevant items of the day is the bare minimum for sustaining an audience—this isn’t likely to happen by dumping your RSS feeds into your account.  Instead, consider offering accounts that are solely RSS-to-Twitter powered for those who use Twitter as a substitute for RSS readers, but be sure to maintain a hand-crafted account for users who have a general interest in your organization.

TwitterMass ($24-$99 per month)

Once you’ve got a regular stream of quality tweets flowing, you need to let people know you’re talking about things they care about.  Thankfully, Twitter allows you to do this on-mass by following people.  This is powerful because when you follow someone, Twitter sends them a message, usually in the form of an email, letting them know that you’re following them.  This results in many of the folks checking out your profile and past tweets, and sometimes following you back.

TwitterMass is a tool that uses the Twitter API to follow folks in swaths of up to 50 people at a time.  TwitterMass does this in three ways:

1. Follow people who are tweeting about a specific word or phrase like “Regulation” or “Federal Reserve”
2. Follow people who are tweeting about a specific word or phrase, but only if they’re in your local area (this works only for folks geo-tagging their tweets).
3. Follow people who are following another Twitter user.

The last item on this list may not be as intuitive as the first two, but it makes perfect sense.  If you’re trying to build an audience for a certain issue, following the folks who are already interested in another individual or group talking about that issue is the perfect place to start building your audience.  Someone out there has already built the audience you’re looking to reach, so why bother reassembling that crowd?

TwitterMass also lets you quickly drop folks you’ve followed, but who haven’t followed you back.  This is especially important as Twitter does limit the number of folks you follow based on the number of folks following you.  So, dropping those people who didn’t return the favor is the only way to keep growing your account.

Social Oomph (Free)

A few months ago, this was my tool of choice for scheduling tweets, but since HootSuite has integrated that feature and tracks the traffic resulting from those tweets, I’ve found that Social Oomph has lost a lot of its utility.  However, it still has a couple of feature worth looking into.

First, you can set this service to auto-follow anyone who follows you.  This is just plain polite in the world of Twitter and allows you to watch what everyone who’s following you is talking about.

Additionally, you can use Social Oomph to automatically send folks who follow you a Direct Message (visible only to them) that thanks them for the follow and maybe even refers them to a web page you’re trying to promote.  Right now, the Mercatus Center is asking its new followers to also check out our Facebook page, for example.

Final Words

So, don’t trust the gurus when they say you need their expertise to be effective on Twitter.  You just need the right tools, a little setup time, and a consistent program of tweeting and following new people.