December 21, 2008 – 5:51 am
The following report is by J Barnes who is an SEO adviser for AdZeit
Everyone wants as much traffic from search engines, but not many people know the basics that you need to do to set the ball in motion.
While running PPC (Pay Per Click) adverts or buying traffic is a great way to get that extra boost of traffic when you need it most for special offers or new lines, but you can not rely on this form of traffic. If you do not tap into the search engines for your traffic, you will be on a endless treadmill of paying for every new user. If you ever needed to cut back on your advertising spending, you would have nothing to fall back on.
In this report I will be talking about:
- What is a sitemap?
- Why do I need one?
- How do I show the search engines where my sitemap is?
- What is a ping?
- Why do I need it?
- How can I create an automatic ping?
- When does a ping start to pong?
What is a sitemap?
A sitemap is a list of your pages, posts, categories, tags and all other viewable content on your website in a format that search engines would be able to read. When used correctly, it provides the search engines with a complete list of available content that the search engine can index.
Why do I need one?
If you have a 5 page html website, then the sitemap will be quite small, but will still help the indexing of your website by search engines. However, most website owners are using content managers such as forums and blogs like phpbb, wordpress, joomla. This creates a much more complex site as a single page would create more than one page of viewable content.
For example, if you use wordpress and create a post with 5 tags and you put the post in 2 categories. This would create 1 page for each tag and category as well as the post giving you a total of 8 pages of viewable content.
There are 2 ways that you can create sitemaps, automatic and manually. For some reason, most software such as wordpress does not come with an automatic sitemap generator. It would be extremely time consuming to write the sitemap yourself and we would always advise you to use an automatic sitemap generator.
If you have a small html website, it will not change as much as if you were using wordpress. You would have to use a manual sitemap generator.
Search engines will always index a site that often creates new pages and content over a 4 page site that rarely changes. Using a content manager like wordpress will help boost your website in the search engine rankings as well as making it possible to fully automate the sitemap generation and submission process.
How do I show the search engines where my sitemap is?
There are 3 main search engines that you should register with and tell them where your sitemap is.
Google.com
Register with google and login to the Webmaster Tools here
You should be taken straight to the dashboard. Here you should enter your website address in the bar at the top and click on “Add Site”.
You will be taken to the overview where you will see “Next Step”. Click on “Verify your site” and then select a verification method using the drop down menu. You can either add some code in the header of your site, or upload a file. Uploading a file is the easiest option if you are not confidant with editing the header of your site.
To do this you would select “Upload an Html file” from the dropdown menu. This will give you a name of the html file you need to upload. Select and copy the fill name including the “.html”.
Next, open notepad which can be found on your windows pc under “Start”, “Accessories”. When notepad opens, select “file” and “Save As” from the menu at the top. Click on the “Save as type” dropdown menu and select “all files”. In the File name box you should paste the name of the html file that you copied from google, select where you want to save the file on your pc and click on save.
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Next, you should upload the html file to your website. Check that the html file is there by clicking on the link in Step 2 of the verification process on the Google WebMasters Tools page you should still have open.
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If you get a 404 error, you have uploaded the html file to the wrong location. Check and try again.
If you see a blank page, it has worked. Click on the “Verify” button and google should now verify the file is in the correct location. You should always leave this file on your site to show your continued ownership.
We will now tell google where your sitemap is. Click on “Sitemap” in the menu to the left, on the page that opens, click on “Add a sitemap”.
Using the drop down menu, select which sitemap you have. The most common is “General Web Sitemap”. Enter the location of your sitemap in the box provided, if your sitemap is at “www.YourDomain.com/sitemap.xml”, you would enter “sitemap.xml” as it already includes your domain name to the left.
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Click on “Add general web sitemap” and google will add it to it’s list of sites to index. It can take upto 1 month for google to index your site and make the results available in their searches.
Yahoo.com
As with google, you will need a yahoo account. Once you have an account click here to visit their Yahoo Site Explorer.
Enter your domain into the address box under “My Sites” and click on the “Add My Site” button.
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The domain will be added to the list under the address box. Click on the “explore” button next to your domain name.
On the menu to the left click on “Feeds” and on the page that loads you should enter the location of your sitemap as you did with google above and then click on the “Add Feed” Button.
Looking at the menu to the left again, click on “Authentication” and you will be given an option of two authentication methods. As with google, the easiest is to upload a html file. Yahoo will provide you with this file to download, making the process a lot easier.
Once you have downloaded and uploaded the html file to your domain you should check that it is working using the link in step 2. When you know it has been successful you can click on the “Authenticate” button in step 3.
MSN
As with the above two search engines, you will need an account. You can register and login here.
Once logged in you will be on the main dashboard. In the menu to the left you should see “Site List” at the very top. Click on it and it will load the page that will include your websites when you logon in the future.
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To add your site you should click on the “Add a site” button at the bottom of the page. This will load a page that has a few inputs for your site details. These are web address (the full address to your website. eg http://www.YourDomain.com) and sitemap address (the full address to your sitemap). Enter your e-mail and decide if you want e-mails from msn by adding or removing a tick from the box below your email.
When you have completed all the required fields, click on the “submit” button at the bottom. Your site has now been added to msn/live.com search engine.
What is a ping?
A ping is a simple connection that can be made for a number of reasons. Here we will be looking at pings that are used to provide information of new pages.
Why do I need it?
Pings are the best way to inform a number of indexing websites that you have published new content. A number of services that use pings include Technorati.com. You can ping from a specific address on your website which will tell them of the new content. With Technorati.com you can register with them and claim your blogs. This process will mean that you can add keywords to your blog listing. This will make your search engine position gain higher results in the major search engines.
How can I create an automatic ping?
The best blogs, forums and online journals will include a section that will automatically ping certain sites. You should be able to alter the list and add more sites. We have checked and tested a massive number of indexing services that accept pings. From this list we have tested each site and compiled a list of the services that we consider the best services to include in your ping list.
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://1470.net/api/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping.php
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/pingPodcast
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc/
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://pingqueue.com/rpc/
http://ping.blogg.de/
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.britblog.com/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rpc.wpkeys.com/
http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx
http://signup.alerts.msn.com/alerts-PREP/submitPingExtended.doz
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.holycowdude.com/rpc/ping/
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://www.imblogs.net/ping/
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://www.zhuaxia.com/rpc/server.php
http://www.blogsdominicanos.com/ping/
http://www.xianguo.com/xmlrpc/ping.php
http://www.feedsky.com/api/RPC2
When does a ping start to pong?
A ping can really start to stink if you ping too much for the same content. If you are using pingbacks on blogs, where a linkback will be made everytime you send a ping by creating content on your blog and link to a site that accepts pingbacks. It is possible to create a lot of pingbacks to blogs and receive a lot of link backs very quickly, however if you create a lot of pingbacks for the sake of getting free link backs for irrelevant content. You will quickly find that your blog will become banned from a lot of services and your site will be almost useless.
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