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 So you have spent the last six months designing the best website you have ever seen and it never appears in Google or any other search engine rankings.
Why not and how do you get it up to the top? The chances are if your site is not doing well in search engine rankings you haven't invested enough of the right kind of time in optimising your site for it. We can help you with this and get you started but there is also an awful lot you can do for yourself. What this is not:- This is not meant to be a definitive guide as there are many many books and websites out there which do that. Have a look at the bottom of this page for books and sites which have guided us.
- It is not a guaranteed recipe for success. No SEO campaign can be as its success will be dependant on the level of competition you face and the level of effort being put in by your competitors.
What this is:- This is some of what we know on the subject, consider it our revision notes and your step by step check-list.
- You will find that we general discuss SEO in terms of Google. However, most of the techniques should be applicable elsewhere. On occasion when we are aware of differences we will describe them and explain how to deal with them.
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How to produce a Site Maps |
Sitemaps are typically lists of the pages that can be found in your site. These are particularly useful if:- You use dynamic URLs.
- Your site has content which aren't easily crawled using by the Googlebot (A webcrawler) e.g. it has lots of AJAX or Flash in it.
- Your site is new and has few links to it. The Googlebot follows one link to another. If your site has few links it will be difficult to find.
- Your site has a large archive of pages which are not linked together or linked at all.
You can also use a site map to provide information on: - How often the pages change.
- When a page was last updated.
- The importance of pages on your site e.g. Homepage 1.0 Category 0.8 and individual blog entries 0.5.
Guidelines for Sitemap DesignGoogle adheres to Sitemap Protocol 0.9 as defined by http://www.sitemaps.org and produces the following set of guidelines to consider when producing a site map for submission via their web developer tools package: - A Sitemap can contain a list of URLs or a list of Sitemaps.
- If your Sitemap contains a list of other Sitemaps, you should save it as a Sitemap index file and use the XML format provided for that file type. A Sitemap index file cannot list more than 50,000 Sitemaps.
- A Sitemap file can contain no more than 50,000 URLs and be no larger than 10MB when uncompressed. If your Sitemap is larger than this, break it into several smaller Sitemaps. These limits help ensure that your web server is not overloaded by serving large files to Google.Specify all URLs using the same syntax. For instance, if you specify your site location as http://www.example.com/, your URL list should not contain URLs that begin with http://example.com/. And if you specify your site location as http://example.com/, your URL list should not contain URLs that begin with http://www.example.com/.
- Do not include session IDs in URLs.
- Do not include direct image URLs in Sitemaps. Google does not index the image directly; instead, we index the page on which the image appears. Direct image URLs included in Sitemaps won't be indexed.
- The Sitemap URL must be encoded for readability by the webserver on which it is located. In addition, it can contain only ASCII characters. It can't contain upper ASCII characters or certain control codes or special characters such as * and {}. If your Sitemap URL contains these characters, you'll receive an error when you try to add it.
How to produce a site map |
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Registering your site with Search Engines |
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You have to tell the search engines that your site exists. A good place to start is by checking your sites status with Google and the other search engines. - Do a site search e.g. www.web-ethical.co.uk and see if your site is still in the index.
- Check your search status on Google by using their site status service https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/sitestatus
- Check that your site ranks for its domain name by searching for its domain only e.g. site:web-ethical.co.uk.
- See how your site is indexed by Google e.g. info:web-ethical.co.uk.
- Find out what other sites link to your site e.g link:web-ethical.co.uk.
If you haven't told the Search Engine then this is how you tell them:
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