One way to optimise your site for Google driven search engines is to create a Google Sitemap.
You can use Google’s script to do this automatically by running it on your (host’s) server using Python or you can create a sitemap manually with an xml page. Including valid xml tag definitions is a sure way to improve the validity of search results.
This is an example of how the xml page is structured:
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/
<lastmod>2005-01-01
<changefreq>monthly
<priority>0.8
Google have a sitemap validation tool available from their support page.
Once you have created a sitemap you need to log in to a google account and find the webmasters area. There you will submit the sitemap address and verify site ownership. Once you do that Google offer the GooglAnalytics information ( Query stats | Crawl stats | Page analysis | Index stats | HTTP errors | Unreachable URLs | URLs restricted by robots.txt | URLs not followed | URLs timed out ).
Search engines are increasingly an important marketing tool for all business - especially those who’s brand is not widely known. Appropriate keywords, content and one-way links from high pagerank sites are the main factors for success.
Other factors include:
- The way a site’s mark=up (HTML) is structured is important. Using the page title and heading tags (H1, H2 etc.
- The way the site is linked together - ie. the navigation system and internal links within the content help if done well
- URLs for variables (e.g. site?p=page1) are disliked by search engines.
- Using frames is a bad idea.
- The amount of time the domain has been in use (by the current owner - google checks this) is a factor.
- The frequency it’s modified.
written by mat
