Properly notifying the major search engines of the various pages on your site can further improve the organic search engine traffic to your site. A common XML standard has been adopted by Google, Yahoo!, and MSN that makes mapping your site and getting the word out quick and convenient. There are a number of ways to build your XML sitemap, the most tedious of which is by hand. Mac users can use the Rage Google Sitemap Automator, which can not only generate the file for you just by providing the URL to your site, but it can even upload the file to your server and ping Google to let them know where the file is. Notifying Yahoo! has to be done manually via their Site Explorer tool, but the file doesn’t need to change at all. MSN is running behind trying to get a submission site set up, so although they are 100% behind the sitemap protocol, there is no means to submit your file.
WordPress users will be happy to know that an amazing Google Sitemap Generator plugin exists to create and submit your sitemap.xml to Google directly from your admin panel. Installation is simple, but a video tutorial has been created to walk your through the process should you get confused. The file it creates is also fine to submit to Yahoo! for indexing, making publicizing the structure of your site effortless.
Because blogs are updated frequently (hopefully that content is valuable to readers), are often rich with valuable links, and inherently are filled with keywords, search engines tend to like to direct people to them. Blogging can be a very valuable tool in driving traffic to a site. WordPress is one of my favorite blogging platforms because of its Web Standards complaint code, intuitive interface, and its rabidly loyal user-base who regularly develop useful plugins for the extensible platform. If you are concerned about SEO, there are a few of things you can do to make your WordPress blog more search engine friendly.
- Whenever adding links to your posts, be sure to include keyword rich titles in the “Title” field. The same goes when adding images, where you will want to include both title and description. Think of the alternative as well as the common words people might use to search for the content you are posting.
- In your WordPress admin panel, go to Options > Permalinks, and change the permalink structure to be date and name based. By choosing this option, the URLs that link to each blog post will include the keywords in the title of the post. Search engines look at the URL of a page for keywords when assessing relevance to a user’s search, so this will boost your rankings on the keywords in the title of the post. Of course, you should think carefully when choosing the title for a post, considering the best keywords to use in the title. Don’t try to stuff all keywords in the title, though. Keep it natural as search engines look for this.
- Modify your WordPress template to create more search engine friendly title tags. The title tag is seen by search engines as an important place to find out what a page is about. By default, WordPress writes something like this in the title tag for a permalink page: Blog Name ¬ª Blog Archive. That’s not very descriptive. It would be better if it wrote the name of the post instead of “blog archive”. To modify this your WordPress blog has to be self installed, not hosted on the WordPress server. Find header.php in wp-content > themes > themename (themename is the name of the theme you wish to modify). Open the file in a text editor or Dreamweaver. Change the default:[php][/php] to [php][/php]
It goes without saying that if you are designing your own WordPress theme, be sure to use Web Standards and do your best to make your site Section 508 or WCAG Accessible. This alone will provide more meaningful ways for a search engine to find out what your site is about as your content will use semantic markup, and will have more content to index in alt, title, and longdesc attributes and many other places when design with Accessibility in mind. South By Southwest had a two part great panel discussion with experts on both Web Standards and SEO in 2006, which they released as podcasts.
Part 1: Web Standards and SEO: Searching for Common | Part 2: Web Standards and Search Engines: Searching
