If you click the ‘Insert Coin’ button again, Ms. PAC-MAN magically shows up so that you can play with a friend. The game’s only up for 48 hours, so be sure to hop over to Google for some tasty ghost meat. Too bad you’re stuck with the original music, instead of ‘Pac-Man Fever’ or Aphex Twin’s classic, delirious ‘Pacman’ remix as Power-pill.

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.

Site Performance

They recently started an initiative known as “Let’s make the web faster” and they released an experimental feature called “Site Performance.” You access this tool from the Google Webmaster Tools dashboard.

During 2009, Google has been growing more and more focused on speed. Last month alone, there were two major developments and Matt Cutts indicated that Google might make page speed a ranking factor in 2010.

They did a post about this topic on their blog, the Google Webmaster Central Blog: “On Site Performance, you will find how fast your pages load, how they have fared over time, how your site’s load time compares to that of other sites, examples of specific pages and their actual page load times, and Page Speed suggestions that can help reduce user-perceived latency.”

Additional information and recommendations should become available over time, too. This tool should benefit just about everyone, considering that most sites visitors are impatient and sites do better when they stick around. After checking a site with this tool, it usually gives recommendations like reducing the amounts of DNS Lookups or using GZIP compression if it’s activated in your server. Also, if you want to send your feedback or opinions about the Site Performance feature, just be sure to let them know through the Webmaster Tools Forum.

So please don’t copy! You should create your own unique content. I’m talking about original articles written by yourself. Of course you can grab some ideas from other sites, but make sure you don’t copy-paste the articles or you will be in trouble and your site will get penalized by most search engines.

For example, there are many similar titles in the search results: Top 10 SEO Tips, Top 10 SEO ideas, etc. So Google shows less than half of these content pages in its results, because it is trying to avoid duplicate pages. So no matter how cool these Top 10 or Top 100 titles are, try to avoid them. Come on, it shouldn’t be so difficult to come up with a nice, unique title created by yourself!

Make sure you install any of my WordPress Themes optimized for search engines. Both themes are coded to avoid duplicate content in every page. Download Tandil Theme here and Patagonia Theme here.

There are some services that let you submit your site “automatically”. Currently, there are only four “major” search engines, and you can’t even submit to all of them. 95% of your search engine traffic will come from one of these major search engines. This is not really a good deal, even if it’s free. The same applies to software that submits your site to “thousands” of search engines. As I’ve just stated, only a few search engines actually matter. Using this software is more likely to generate a flood of junk email than anything else, so stay away of it.

If all of this sounds like I’m recommending you let the search engines find you, rather than submitting your site, I am. I haven’t submitted anything to the search engines in years, and it rarely takes more than a week or so for them to find and crawl my new sites. If your site has some unique content, it will be crawled even faster. I recommend using WordPress, since it will ping all major search engines automatically and I recommend using one of my SEO optimized WordPress themes, Patagonia or Tandil Theme.

You must focus on getting links set up – this will not only improve your rankings, it will ensure that the search engines can find you on their own. Some search engines (like Yahoo) offer a “paid inclusion” program. Although you get no special advantage from using it, in terms of your site’s ranking, it does ensure that your site’s indexing is up to date. This isn’t necessarily a great deal, since it usually involves paying by the click for traffic you may have gotten anyway.

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.