Crawl augmentation

Although web spiders are continuously improving, they are far from perfect. Search engines have no problems admitting this. Here is what Google says about crawl aug mentation:
Submitting a Sitemap helps you make sure Google knows about the URLs on your site. It can be especially helpful if your content is not easily discoverable by our crawler (such as pages accessible only through a form). It is not, however, a guarantee that those URLs will be crawled or indexed. We use information from Sitemaps to augment our usual
crawl and discovery processes.

Poor linking site structure

Not all sites are created equal. Sites with poor linking structures tend to index poorly. Orphan pages, deep links, and search engine traps are culprits of poor site indexing. The use of Sitemaps can alleviate these situations, at least temporarily, to give you enough time to fix the root of the problem.

Crawling frequency

One of the biggest benefits of using Sitemaps is in timely crawls or recrawls of your site (or just specific pages). XML Sitemap documents let you tell crawlers how often they should read each page. Sites using Sitemaps tend to be crawled faster on Yahoo! and Google. It takes Google and Yahoo! minutes to respond to Sitemap submissions or resubmissions. This can be very helpful for news sites, e-commerce sites, blogs, and any other sites that are constantly updating or adding new content.

Content ownership

Many malicious web scraper sites are lurking around the Internet. Having search engines index your content as soon as it is posted can be an important way to ensure that search engines are aware of the original content owner. In this way, a copycat site does not get the credit for your content. Granted, it is still possible for search engines to confuse the origins of a content source.

Sitemap plugin for WordPress

If you want to add a Sitemap to your WordPress Blog, make sure to install and activate this WordPress plugin that generates an XML Sitemap.

It may be a long time before the majority of people switch over to Bing. The fact is that for many people, the word Google is currently a synonymous of “search engine”. At the time of this writing, Microsoft is investing a lot of money and time in marketing Bing, spending tens of millions of dollars on Bing campaigns.

Over the next few years, Microsoft will battle it out with Google for the top spot in the search engine market share. Microsoft did this with Netscape in the browser wars back in the mid 90′s, so there is no reason to believe it will not attempt to do the same thing with Google now.

The Bing search interface is similar to any other search engine. Bing inherited the same tabs from its predecessor, including Web, Images, News, Maps, Videos and
More. However it differs in its search results. The left side of Bing’s search results page is called the Explorer panel. Within the Explorer pane, you are presented with results categories (quick tabs) if your particular search query has related search categories.

To the right of the Explorer pane are the actual search results, which are now more centered on the page when compared to Google’s search results. Every search result is also accompanied by a Quick Preview pane. Bing will select additional text from the URL to show in this pane. The intent is to help searchers see more information about the destination URL before they click on the search result and taken to the site.

First Rule: Try to Avoid Frames.
Search engines don’t handle frames very well, so you’re better off avoiding the use of frames. If you must use them, simply create a “NOFRAMES” version of
your Blog that links all of your content together. But the best option is to avoid frames.

Second Rule: Flash, QuickTime, Add-ons, etc.
Search engine spiders actually can read and index Flash web sites. The problem is that they can’t really trust what they find in the Flash files, because there’s no easy way
to determine which text is visible. Designing your entire site in Flash is crazy from a usability standpoint. This doesn’t mean that you can’t use Flash, QuickTime, or other plug-ins selectively on your HTML web pages. You can. There are a lot of cool things you can do with embedded audio and video, or with the interactive elements that Flash can create. Just because search engines don’t see it, that doesn’t mean you can’t use it, but be picky and selective if you want to use those elements.

Third Rule: Be picky with JavaScript.
Although some of the search engines have experimented with reading JavaScript, you should assume that anything you do with JavaScript is basically invisible to spiders. This
doesn’t mean that you should try to get tricky, by doing “sneaky redirects” to take people away from your search engine optimized pages to somewhere else.

Fourth Rule: Image Maps.
Image maps can be useful in design, but the search engines don’t all follow them, and like images, there’s no way to include anchor text. You need an alternative form
of navigation if you use image maps.

Fifth Rule: HTML Validation.
Actually, there’s a lot of debate about whether HTML validation is important or not. In my experience, running your code through an HTML validator will almost always
generate a lot of “warnings” that don’t mean much in the real world. However, when you see actual “errors”, this might mean that you have forgotten to close a tag or
something, and this can create issues with spidering and indexing. My rule of thumb is to fix the errors and ignore the warnings or analyze the warnings carefully. For example if you have a paypal link on your Blog and you do a CSS test, you will probably get a warning, but there is no problem with the link itself, it’s just that the CSS Validator doesn’t recognize the paypal code. So in this case, you should just ignore that warning and leave your paypal link where it is. This kind of warning is not going to affect your site at all in terms of SEO.

Also remember that Tandil Theme is 100% Valid CSS and XHTML.

Good luck!

If you believe that there’s some top secret about SEO that the “insiders” are not telling you, you are experiencing normal healthy paranoia. Good for you, since your ancestors were the same way, and sometimes it helped them survive. Back in the Stone Age, if one of your caveman buddies drank some yellow water from the hot springs, and got sick, everyone stayed away from it. The ability to learn is a big part of why we’re all still here trying to improve day after day.

On the other hand, if you killed a gazelle with white spots on its tail, and then there was an earthquake, you might have thought twice about killing another one like that. Today, we know better, however we still have superstitions. I know some people really are better at SE Optimization than others. But their success is mostly due to more experience and better processes. The people who are exceptionally good at SEO also have a lot of knowledge about the technical side of search engines and web sites.

I’m not going to talk about the mechanics of SEO in this article. This is just an introduction note to let people know that there is no such thing as “SEO secrets”, so don’t become too crazy about it. Instead look for objective information, and that’s what I’m going to post in my coming articles.

Stay tuned.