While ReadyMadeWeb works hard to provide you with a knowledge of best practices for SEO, the folks at Google are a bit better equipped to tell you how to best interact with their own search engine. Check out the SEO for Beginners Guide at the Google Webmaster blog or watch the very comprehensive video below on search-friendly web devlopment to get the real insider perspective on SEO.
From the category archives:
Search Engine Optimization
Even if you’re using a sitemap generator that automatically submits your sitemap to Google, Yahoo, and Bing, it’s more than worthwhile to manually submit your sitemap to Google using Google Webmaster Tools. Though automatic submission does make Google aware of your sitemap, manual submission will allow Google to verify your ownership of the site, allow you verify that your sitemap is being indexed, and will give you access to Google’s many diagnostic tools to help you keep your site in top shape.
Check out this how-to video to see, step-by-step, how to submit your sitemap to Google:
Like I’ve said in previous posts, which you can find below, sitemaps are a vital part of any site. Thankfully, like so many other things we talk about here at ReadyMadeWeb, generating a sitemap is easy.
Today, I want to take a look at creating a sitemap in WordPress, which should only take you a few minutes.
Check it out:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
