1.  Give Your Pages Appropriate Filenames.  A common mistake I see on many sites are strange abbreviations webmasters use to name their files.  For example, a page that contains information about green living should not be named grnliv.html.  Instead, name it green-living.html.  This lets the search engines connect the page to the most appropriate keywords.

WordPress Tip – If you are using WordPress or another content management system that supports it, select the option for “name-based” Permalinks.  This will ensure that URL for each page or post contains the title – and, therefore, appropriate keywords – and not just a numeric reference.

2.  Use Appropriate Title, Keyword and Description Meta Tags.  Another common mistake is the failure to create an appropriate title for each of your pages.  Many HTML editors automatically create a title tag for each page.  Unfortunately, it is usually something like “New Page 1″.  This of course is not going to help the search engines connect the page to appropriate keywords.  Make sure you give each page on your site an appropriate title.

Very related to this are the meta tags used to identify the page’s keywords and description.  Make sure you each of your pages have these tags and that they have appropriate values.  The tags should be placed within the head tags of your page.

WordPress Tip:  Consider using a plugin like the All in One SEO Pack.  It handles many of these tasks automatically.

3.  Create a Site Map.  It is common for sites to have page that provides an outline or list of links to all of the pages on the site.  That’s definately useful for your visitors, but it’s not the type of sitemap I am referring to.  What I am referring to is a specially formatted XML file that tells the search engines about all of the pages on your site.  This is important for one very obvious reasons: the search engines can’t rank your pages if they don’t know about them.  To learn more about creating a site map see the post I have written on that topic:  Create and Submit a Site Map Feed.

WordPress Tip:  Use the Google Sitemaps plugin.  It will update your sitemap each time you post.

4.  Keep your Content Fresh.  The search engines love fresh content.  Creating new and updating existing pages on your site goes a long way to improving your position in relevant searches.  One of the easiest ways to to do this is to start blog.  Blogging software like WordPress make content management much easier then using HTML editing tools, so your more likely to stay on top of it.  And it’s not just the search engines like fresh content – so do your visitors.  Creating area of your site that is updated regularly is a great way to keep them coming backup.  They are also more likely to bookmark and share your site with others.

5.  Avoid Duplicate Content.  Having duplicate content on your site – or content duplicated from other sites – will dilute your page rank.  Avoid this by creating original content for each page on your site.  Take this further by avoiding duplicate title, keyword and description meta tags.

Tip:  Use Google Webmaster Tools to help monitor some of these issues.

6.  Make your Content Easy to Share. Speaking of bookmarking another important way of improving your PageRank is to have several other sites and pages link back to your site.  Social bookmark sites like Digg and StumbleUpon are excellent forums for doing just that.  Promoting your site using these means is called Social Media Marketing and to be effective you need to make your content easy to share.  Do this using a social bookmarking widget, like Bookmarkify.

Have some SEO experience that you would like to share?  Your comments are welcome.

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The first and most important thing you need to do – submitting your site to major search engines – is the focus of today’s post. The reason this is so important – if it’s not already obvious – is simple. Your site can’t be on the first few result pages of search, if your site is not even listed in the search engine’s index. There are services that can do this for you, however, it is something that you can do yourself pretty easily.

Create a Site Map

In the old days of the Internet we used to submit our sites to search engines by simply going to the search engines site and telling them where our site’s home page was. Sometime later, if you were lucky, the search engines crawler or “bot” would scan your site and add it to their index. Today there is a new way evolving that gives you more control over how the search engine sees your site. That method is using a Site Map or Site Feed.

Site maps are an easy way to inform search engines about all of the pages on your site. I’m not talking about your site’s sitemap page that provides your visitor with links to your various pages.  I am talking about an XML file that is used exclusively by the search engines. This file lists the URL’s along with additional information such as it’s update frequency, last change and relative importance of the page. The site map gives search engines the ability to crawl and index your site more intelligently. It does not guarantee that your pages will be indexed by the search engine, however, it does make sure that the search engine knows about the pages you want indexed.

Creating a Site Map is a relatively simple process. It can be done with any text editor, or, if you are familiar with MS XML Notepad, you can use it. The protocol, or layout, used for a site map file has been sponsored by a partnership between Google, Yahoo and Microsoft and is documented at the Sitemaps Web Page, http://www.sitemap.org. There you will find more details for the protocol’s specification. There are tools that will generate the sitemap for you automatically, but I found many of them lacking and not dependable. If may be a good way to create the initial version, but if you have the patience, it will be more accurate if you edit and maintain it yourself.

Here is an example snippet of code from the sitemap.xml file here at GARA Systems.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.gara.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2008-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.gara.com/about</loc>
<lastmod>2008-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

There are some free tools out there for validating the sitemap, however, I found that it’s easiest to just submit the sitemap to Google (see below). If there is a problem with your file the Google Webmaster Tools will let you know.

TIP – If you use a WordPress blog check out the Google Sitemaps Generator for WordPress. It’s a plugin that updates your site map every time you post.

Uploading Your Site Map

You should place the sitemap in the root directory of your site. If you have more than one sitemap, you can place each in the folder it maps or keep them in the root and use different filenames.

Feed Your Site Map To Major Search Engines

Now that your sitemap is up it’s time to tell the world where it is. Once way to let search engines know about your sitemap is by placing the following line – using your sitemap, of course – in your ROBOTS.TXT file.

Sitemap: http://www.gara.com/sitemap.xml

The next time the search engine crawls your site, it should see this entry and make use of your new site map. But don’t depend on it. It is better to do an explicit submission with each of the major search engines.

Use Google Webmaster Tools to submit your sitemap to Google. This will also submit your site to AOL as their listings come from Google’s index.

Use Yahoo! Site Explorer to submit your sitemap to Yahoo!. The Yahoo! tool let’s you submit your home page or a Site Feed. You want to select the Site Feed option to submit your sitemap.xml file. Submitting to Yahoo! will also submit your site to the AllTheWeb.com search engine that is now part of the Yahoo!.

Use MSN Live Search URL Submission to submit your sitemap to Microsoft. This tool appears to only accept your homepage, however, you can submit the URL of your Site Feed as well.

Submitting your site to Ask is a bit different. To do so you must use a ping URL that passes your sitemap as part of the query string. Here is an example:

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.gara.com/sitemap.xml

To use this link, replace the URI that identifies the GARA Systems sitemap.xml file with one that identifies the one for your site. Then just paste the full link into your browser’s address bar. You will be taken to a confirmation page notifying you the sitemap has been submitted.

Conclusion

Well, that’s about it. Now the three most popular search engines will know about every page of your site. You should keep your Site Feed fresh by adding the URL’s of new pages, removing dead links and updating the lastmod attribute anytime you change a page. You shouldn’t need to resubmit the feed to the search engines as they should scan them regularly now that they know about it, but it won’t hurt if you do.

Of course there is much more to search engine optimization then this initial task, but it is essential, nevertheless. In future posts I will talk about some of the other simple and effective things you can do to improve your site’s page rankings. Stay tuned!!

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