One tip I would recommend for anyone wanting to increase their visibility in the search engines is to read Google’s webmasters guidelines. This is an overlooked resource as it gives a wealth of good information and guidelines to follow when optimising your website. This information describes how Google actually indexes your pages and offers tips on the best practices.
If you have heard of a new technique and you’re wondering if Google takes it into account then this is a good place to start. For example there is a lot of buzz going around about the “nofollow “tag and a lot of people are wondering when they should use it. If you go to http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769 you will find out what Google thinks of this technique and how best to use it.
Google Sitemaps
Another good Google resource is Google sitemaps. When you set up an account you can submit a sitemap.xml. A sitemap.xml is a list of all your webpage’s within your website and contains information on when it was last updated etc. This will help Google index your website quicker. This tool also gives you lots of information on your website. It gives information on how many links are pointing to your website, far more exact than typing in site: www.yourdomain.com. Other information it holds are what your top keyphrases are and crawl rates. If you haven’t done so already I would really recommend you submit a sitemap to Google.
This may sound like basic stuff but you would be surprised by the amount of people who say they know SEO who haven’t even read the guidelines. So to get your website of to the best start I would recommend doing the above. If you’re thinking of hiring an SEO company, I would quote Google on this; “THE EARLIER THE BETTER”.
Author:
Kevin Gallagher
SEO Manager for Moovin On Up
Website Design and Ecommerce Solutions
Hi Kevin,
Another great post! Regarding sitemaps is there a limit to the number of links you can have on a Sitemap and will Google automatically index every page in the sitemap? Is it also good practice to link to the sitemap from your homepage or does Google know where to go as you tell them in webmaster tools?
There is no limit to the amount you can submit a good tool that can create a sitemap is A1 sitemap generator, Google won’t automatically index your pages but it will know where to find them. Google decides which pages it indexes and can be determined by many factors. You don’t need to link to it anywhere on your website as you instruct Google where it’s located on the server. It’s a testament to Google’s commitment to return relevant up to date results.
Just an update on the question that Barry had, there is in fact a limit to the Url’s you can submit in one sitemap and that 50,000. If your website exceeds this limit then you would need to create an index file that links to other sitemap.xml files for more information visit here http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=71453