Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ↓
Why a Good Site Map is SO Crucial for SEO, and How To Do It RIGHT
Posted in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
You can have an awesome site with tons of awesome articles… but it’s all completely worthless unless visiting search engines – and your web site visitors – can easily find what they’re looking for.
A good site map is crucial, not just for search engines to find your content, but also for your visitors.
Search engines depend on site maps to find all of your buried articles
One of the real benefits of a blog or web site is that your articles accumulate over time, and so your site becomes more valuable to the search engines. So, you end up getting more web site traffic over time.
But search engines can’t send you traffic if they don’t know what great content is hiding on your site. Let them quickly and easily find all our your articles with a dynamically generated site map.
For a quick example, see what we’re doing with site maps in the footer of our www.AskDanAndJennifer.com Dating & Relationship advice column.
Your web site visitors often like to look around and get their bearings
A site map is also very helpful to give your visitors an at-a-glance view of your site, how it’s organized, what information is available where, and so on. Some visitors like and even expect easily accessible site maps, while others don’t care for them. But you’re better off having one and giving them the option.
How to create a great, dynamic site map which automatically updates with your latest web site content
First, create an automatically updating HTML site map page for your visitors
This is mainly for your visitors, but also for some search engines that happen to find it.
We recommend the XHTML site map template from Chris Pearson.This is not a plugin per-se, but rather a custom WordPress page that auto-generates your site map. Get it here.
Then, create a Google XML site map for your favorite search engines
Although the format is referred to as "Google Site Map format", the other major search engines (Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com) have agreed with Google on this format, so they will all be able to use the same site map.
Get the Google XML Sitemap Plugin, which auto-generates a site map in Google Site Map format. This plugin also updates the site map every time you make a blog post.
You absolutely do NOT want to be updating a site map by hand every time you post. Unless of course you would find that therapeutic. 
To get the most search engine benefit, include your UTW tag pages in your site map
Add your UTW tag pages to your dynamic site map with the Google Sitemaps – UTW Tag Addon plugin.
Tell Google directly about your site map
You can tell Google where to find your site map through Google Webmaster Tools.
Login to Google Webmaster Tools with your Google account, and tell Google the location of your site map.
- After logging in to Google Webmaster Tools, fill in the name of your site, and submit it. You’ll have to prove that you own the site, but it’s a very easy process – basically uploading a file to your site for Google to verify. Follow their very simple directions.
- Then follow the prompts to submit your site map.
Tell Yahoo directly about your site map
Yahoo also provides a way to submit the location of your update site map, through the Yahoo Site Explorer.
Then follow the simple step by step process to prove to Yahoo that you are the owner of your web site, and then submit the location of your site map.
The process is very similar to the one with Google above.
Update your robots.txt file to tell the visiting search engines where to find your site map
The major search engines (Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com) have finally agreed on an easy, universal way to notify a visiting search engine of where to find your site map.
This is a very easy single-line addition to your robots.txt, as shown in this example. Of course, change MyDomain.com to be YOUR web site address.
# Robots.txt file domain: http://www.MyDomain.com/
Sitemap: http://www.MyDomain.com/sitemap.xml
This article is part of the "How to Start a Blog and Make Money Online" series. Be sure to subscribe by RSS or email so you don’t miss the follow-up articles, with all the juicy details.
And be sure to check out How to Start a Blog and Make Money Online – in 10 Easy Steps if you haven’t done so already.
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Does Your Web Site Have Multiple Personality Disorder? Better Hope Google Doesn’t Think So…
Posted in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Millions of people out there are throwing away half their search engine rankings by way of a small web site misconfiguration and a basic but widespread misunderstanding of how search engines work.
This is because some people prefer to send everyone their web address in the form of MyReallyCoolWebsite.com, since it looks less techie. Others use www.MyReallyCoolWebsite.com.
And most web hosts will set you up so that BOTH of these will work, and take visitors to your site.
But is there really a difference?
As search engines see the world, these are TWO different sites!
http://MyReallyCoolWebsite.com is NOT the same as http://www.MyReallyCoolWebsite.com
Which means that in some cases you get HALF the search engine value to one, and HALF the search engine value to the other. Not to mention the duplicate content between the two sites – having 2 sites with identical content is BAD for your search engine rankings.
Should you use the WWW in your web site URL or not?
Ok, the question of the hour…. which one should you go with? As search engines go, it doesn’t really matter. It only really matters in how you promote your site.
Why we prefer to use the www.MyReallyCoolWebsite.com
Your readers and friends can easily spot a web address that begins with www, so you never have to begin it with http://MyReallyCoolWebsite.com.
Picture your web site address on a billboard by the side of the road. Someone driving by has about as much attention span on your site as a visitor cruising your site or someone looking at your site address in an email.
The www at the beginning tells EVERYONE at a glance that they’re looking at your web address. Without that, you’re not drawing their eyes to your address, so they’re less likely to go to your site.
How do you tell Google what your REAL web address is?
You can tell Google what your real web address is through Google Webmaster Tools.
Login to Google Webmaster Tools with your Google account, and tell Google that both your web addresses are actually the same site. You can also specify which one is your preference – www or non-www.
After logging in to Google Webmaster Tools, go to:
Diagnostic — Tools — Preferred domain
That’s all there is to it.
How do you tell the other search engines your REAL web address?
The easiest way to make sure all search engines (and all your visitors) are going to your preferred web address, is to configure your web server to redirect all traffic to your chosen domain.
If you’re running the Apache web server (most everyone is), this change is very easily made to your .htaccess file, in the root directory of your web site directory structure. If you’re running WordPress, you already have this file – so all you need to do is find it, download it, make a backup copy, edit up, and re-upload it. And say a little prayer.
WARNING: You can break your site very easily by having anything incorrect in your .htaccess file.
It’s crucial to back up your .htaccess file before making any changes to it.
How to change your .htaccess file
Here’s what this section of the .htaccess file looks like after adding this server redirect command.
For this example, replace MyReallyCoolWebsite.com with whatever your actual domain is.
# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
# redirect domain.com to www.domain.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_Host} ^MyReallyCoolWebsite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.MyReallyCoolWebsite.com/$1 [R=301,L]RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]# END WordPress
Don’t forget to redirect individual post URLs, not just your main web site home page
Note that there are other simpler ways to add a redirect command to your .htaccess file, but this option above is more powerful.
In addition to redirecting your www and non-www addresses to the same place, this configuration will also redirect specific articles on your site to your new address. This is very important. Without this, even if your main home page is redirected to your new address, any links from other sites to specific pages on your site can break.
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Do You Want Google to Send YOU Thousands of Visitors Every Day?
Posted in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Google, Yahoo, and MSN are literally itching to send one lucky winner lots and lots of free web traffic.
No, seriously. Their customers go to their favorite search engine and search millions of times each day. So, the major search engines are desperately seeking quality content to send these searchers.
So WHY shouldn’t they send this traffic to you?
Fact is, they will if you know how to format your content to make it yummy for Google.
But beware all the fancy search engine tricks and scams. If you try to trick the search engines, they’ll penalize you and delete you from their indexes. That means, "no traffic for you"!
So why not work with the search engines, and give them what they want, the way they want it, and let them send you thousands of visitors a day?
We get thousands and thousands of visitors from Google every day to our Dating & Relationship advice blog. Wouldn’t you like to get the same?
We got to this level by spending countless months reading and learning everything we could get our hands on. Not to mention an untold amount of trial and error, in hopes of learning what Google really wants from a website.
Of course, when we started it would have been nice to have a cheat sheet, a guide to show us the stuff TO do, and what to stay away from.
Well, Aaron Wall did just that. He wrote what has become today’s most popular and respected Search Engine Guide. What’s really cool is that Aaron is constantly updating his guide, to include the latest changes in search engine algorithms, rules, etc. So you can always stay on top of the latest trends, while letting Aaron do the leg work.
Get your hands on this SEO Book and let us know what you think about it.
Don’t do it the hard way like we did. Download the SEO Book today.
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