Monday, February 4, 2013

Making Your Site Accessible to Search Engines (pt 19)

                                Making Your Site Accessible to Search Engines


Indelible Content 

- must be in HTML  text format
- non text format such as images, flash files etc are invisible to search engine spiders
- use  "alt attributes" in html, ( a text description for images) to provide search engines with a description of the pictures etc.
  
Spiderable Link Structures

- spiders use links on web pages to discover other web pages & websites
- therefore you should have links to other pages of your website on your landing page
- don't expect spiders to find these other pages if there's no link to them
- limit number of links per page to about 100, or risk the chance that Google may stop spidering additional links


XML Sitemaps
Google, Yahoo & Microsoft support a protocol known as XML Sitemaps
Sitemaps allow you to supply search engines with a list of the URLs you want them to crawl
Sitemaps don't guarantee the crawling of a URL, but are a compliment to search engines everyday link-based crawl

Creating an XML Sitemap
Find a sitemap generator on internet such as:
www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview/
www. sitemaps.org.xml
www.xml-sitemaps.com
www.sitemapspal.com
www.sitemap.xmlecho.org/sitemap
 

Managing & Updating  XML Sitemaps

After your has been crawled, monitor results & resolve any issues that are exposed.
Update sitemap when new URLs are added, or you've added a volume of static pages, on
the big 3 search engines.
No need to update XML sitemap when updating content on existing URL's.

If your site has multiple URL's that  refer to the same piece of  content include only  a canonical version of each URL.
This will suggest to the search engines which is the preferred version of the page.
Don't include the following:
1.Multiple URL's that point to identical content
2. low value pages on your site
3. URL's  that include tracking parameters

Upload your  sitemap file to the root directory.
Monitor the results of your  XML sitemap after your site has been crawled, & fix any outstanding issues.
View your stats & diagnostics for Google Sitemaps at: google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview

When you add URL's to your site update your XML Sitemap with:
1. Google use your Google Sitemap account or HTTP request
2.Bing
3.Yahoo

No need to update  sitemap if you're adding content to existing URL's.
Good idea to remove deleted pages  to avoid broken links.







 

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