Search engine goodies sitemaps, tools and Site speed

Many search engines provide a number of tools to help webmasters improve the performance of their sites in the search engines, and to help webmasters with the best practices. Google has a number of webmaster tools a collection of tools geared towards helping webmasters manage the errors within their site, and see how Google sees their website—has been developed by Google, and is available for use, freely. Webmasters can also create a sitemap in XML format, to tell Google of all of the pages within our site, their importance within the scheme of the site as a whole, and how frequently they are updated, to help them decide when to return to re-index the updated content.

The webmaster tools in general, outline errors such as duplicate content, duplicate metadata within pages in the same site, as well as broken or forbidden links. More information can be found on the following pages:

• https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en
• http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40318

Site speed

One very new edition to the list of factors to a sites ranking in search engines is the speed of the site, as announced by Google in April 2010. Sites that take a while to load are penalized. More information can be found on the Google blog:

• http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speedin-web-search-ranking.html

There are a number of tools available to help monitor and improve the speed of your website. Some potential tools include:

• YSlow from Yahoo!: http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/
• Page Speed browser plugin: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/
• Articles on speeding up your site: http://code.google.com/speed/articles/

Listing Your Pages with the Major Search Sites

If you want users to find your pages, you absolutely must submit a request
to each of the major search sites to index your pages. Even though search
engines index web content automatically, this is the best way to ensure
your site has a presence on their sites. Each of these sites has a form for
you to fill out with the URL address, a brief description of the site, and, in
some cases, a category or list of keywords with which your listing should
be associated. These forms are easy to fill out; you can easily complete all
of them in an hour with time left over to list yourself at one or two specialized
directories you might have found as well. (How do you find the specialized
directories? Through the major search sites, of course!)

Even though listing with the major search engines is easy and quick, it can
be a bit confusing: Each search engine uses different terminology to identify
where you should click to register your pages. The following list might
save you some frustration; it includes the addresses of some popular
search engines which will include your site for free, along with the exact
wording of the link you should click to register:

Google—Visit http://www.google.com/addurl/, enter the address
of your site and a brief description, and then enter the squiggly verification
text, called a CAPTCHA, (or Completely Automated Public
Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) shown on the
page. Then click the Add URL button to add your site to Google.

Yahoo! Search—Visit http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit,
click on Submit a Website or Webpage, enter the address of your site,
and then click the Submit URL button.

Bing—Visit http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx, enter the verification
text, enter the address of your site, and then click the Submit
URL button.

AllTheWeb—AllTheWeb search results are provided by Yahoo!
Search, so just be sure to submit your site to Yahoo! Search, as
explained previously.

AltaVista—AltaVista search results are also provided by Yahoo!
Search, so just be sure to submit your site to Yahoo!. Search, as
explained previously.