Blogging On My Mind

As a website owner, one of your top priorities is going to be getting your site indexed and ranked by Google. People perform over 235 million searches a day with Google, so the potential to receive significant traffic from this search engine should be enough for you to invest the time to make sure it’s done right.

Google wants to fill its index with quality, error free websites that are beneficial and targeted to their searchers. Enter Google’s Webmaster Central Tools. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s Google’s way of helping you with your website’s indexing. Not too long ago, it went through a redesign and upgrade process which made it more useful and easier to use than ever.

First thing you’ll need to sign in with is a Google account. Google requires an account to be able to use all of their free services, including Blogger and Analytics, so if you don’t have one, now’s the time to register.

If you have multiple websites to list, that’s no problem. Up to 500 sites can be added all under one roof. You will need to perform what Google calls “site verification” for each site submitted. This proves to Google that you are the owner of the site before they release detailed information to you. At one time it was a lengthy process of cutting and pasting code into the head section of your index page or uploading a separate HTML file. Now they’ve streamlined the process and it’s all done with one click of an email.

If you use Blogger.com, “Webmaster Tools” can be enabled from within the Blogger dashboard under tools/resources. Once your sites have been submitted, you’ll have access to a whole suite of useful tools. The website is broken up into three main sections.

1. Site Configuration (Information about your site)
2. Your Site on the Web (Google data re: your site)
3. Diagnostics (Any problems Google had while indexing your site)

If your website has never received a decent ranking with Google, these numerous reports will help you in tracking down the problem. It’s truly an “eye opener” to see your site through the eyes of a search engine.

On the “Crawl Errors Page”, any errors Google encountered while crawling your site are revealed. The url’s not listed, and the types of problems such as restricted by robots txt, url’s that timed out, and unreachable url’s will be uncovered. If numerous pages of your site are not indexed, Sitemaps can also be submitted to help Google find and crawl all of the pages of your site.

If your website is not showing up in Google’s index, or you think it’s being penalized for some reason, you can contact Google from within the “tools interface” with a “reconsideration” request. This will ask Google to take another look at your site. Before submitting, make sure you’ve cleaned up any errors, and that you’re not in violation of any of Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Here’s a small sample of some other tasks that can be performed.

• Keyword Research: The keywords page lists the most important words Google found when indexing your site. So you know what keyword/phrases your site is ranking for.
• Who’s linking to your website.
• Page rank for individual pages can be reviewed.
• Change of address feature, which is useful when moving domains to let Google know.
• Data can be downloaded in spreadsheet format in order to be analyzed and tracked.
• Any RSS feeds can also be submitted as sitemaps.
• Parameter Handling- Allows you to tell Google which url’s you want them to ignore.
• Emails from Google’s Webmaster Tools can be forwarded to any email address you specify.

Contrary to popular belief, Google wants you to succeed online which is why they give you the tools needed to fix any problems, and make your site a search engine’s indexing dream. That’s not just good business for Google, it’s good for your website too.

Merle’s Mission Blog- “Rants, Raves and Random Acts of Kindness” a self proclaimed “Internet Junkie” with a passion for net marketing, affiliate marketing, social networking. An avid Blogger and writer with several niche sites to her credit. Find out more at http://merlesworld.blogspot.com/ Follow me on Twitter http://twitter.com/msmerle

This article courtesy of SiteProNews.com

Have you heard of “blank page syndrome”?

That’s when you sit down to write and the absolute blankness of the page becomes overwhelming to the point where you just can’t think of anything to write.

For a writer, there is nothing worse than starting out writing with a blank page.

I’ve heard that professional writers will purposefully end their writing day in the middle of expressing an idea, so that when they start writing the next morning they just pick up with the thought they left off on, rather than starting a new idea from scratch.

That is a writing trick that allows you to keep your momentum flowing so that you don’t have to go through “blank page syndrome”.

When you’re doing article marketing, you need to produce a steady stream of articles every month. That means that you will be writing pretty regularly, and you’ll have to find a way to contend with “blank page syndrome”.

I’ve got some good news for you–in the same way that professional writers create a cycle of writing momentum by arranging their writing so that they never (or rarely) have to look at a blank page, so you can use what I call an “article skeleton” to rid yourself of the dreaded blank page syndrome.

An article skeleton is the bare bones of a future article. It can be a title, an intro paragraph, or just a few points to more fully elaborate at a later date.

If you can get in the habit of creating article skeletons, your will relieve much stress from the writing process, make it easier to write articles faster, and even have some fun with the whole process!

Here’s how to create an article skeleton:

1. Set aside some time to spend on brainstorming. The purpose of this session is not to write a complete article, but rather come up with several ideas for future articles.
2. You may already have some ideas–quickly start writing down makeshift titles and major points to cover. I find that sometimes the intro paragraph writes itself. The power behind coming up with article skeletons is that the pressure is off–you do not need to do anything final. You are just coming up with ideas, possible intros, and points to cover. The ironic thing is that once there is no pressure to produce a great piece of writing, your writing will often improve along with your creativity. Many times when I look back at an article skeleton I find that I’m very happy with what I’ve written and don’t need to change a thing. Then the little bit that I have already written just propels me to finish out the article.
3. Come up with as many article skeletons as you can–don’t spend too much time on it though. You should not be thinking too much about this or laboring over wording or crafting sentences. A good time limit for each article skeleton is about 5 minutes.
4. Get the skeleton in place and then set it aside for a rainy day.
5. When you sit down to write and are drawing a blank, look through your collection of article skeletons. Look at the titles and see what topic catches your attention. When you open the draft and see that you already have a head start, it’s a huge relief! It’s much easier to write the article once it’s already started.

I’ve got several dozen of these ‘article skeletons’, and it’s always a joy to open one up to find that the article is already started for me. Articles get written so much faster when you don’t have to deal with the “How should I start writing this article?” feeling.

Are you ready to kiss “blank page syndrome” goodbye? Will you try this technique of creating a reserve of article skeletons?

*Steve Shaw is an article marketing expert, and founder of the popular articles submitter, SubmitYOURArticle.com, used by thousands of business owners. Discover how to use the power of article marketing to reach thousands of potential prospects for your website – download a powerful free report on successful article marketing from http://www.submityourarticle.com/report

This article courtesy of SiteProNews.com

At the end of the year, many businesses start to think about redesigning their tired old website to breathe some new life into it. You may even be in the midst of a website redesign right now. If so, the first thing is to make sure you hire a design and development company that knows how to build the infrastructure of the website in a search engine crawler–friendly manner.

Beyond that, you need to address a number of additional SEO tactics before you get too deep into your redesign. The reason you need to keep SEO front and center during this time is twofold: so that you do not lose your previous traffic, but also so that you can gain additional targeted search engine visitors when the new site goes live.

Here are 6 SEO redesign secrets your developer may not know…ignore them at your own peril!

1. Creating Your SEO’d Site Architecture

Search engines look explicitly at how all your pages are linked together in order to determine their place within the site. Pages that are linked from every other page will be given more weight than those that are only linked from a few others. This is all considered a form of internal link popularity, or in Google language, internal PageRank.

Recommendation: During your redesign, don’t bury too deeply within the site any content that was previously bringing targeted search engine traffic. Ensure that any informational content that will be focused on the more competitive keyword phrases (for example, product and service pages) is high up in your site hierarchy.

In addition, all content contained in a specific category should be cross-linked via some sort of sub-navigation within that section.

2. Categorization and Avoiding Duplicate Content

When people are seeking information from a search engine, they usually have a question, a problem, or a need for specific information. The search queries they use at Google and the other engines reflect this. The more ways you can categorize your content for the various target markets you serve, the better.

Recommendation: Be sure that all top-level pages answer the potential searcher’s (your potential customers’) questions, and that it’s clear that your products and services can solve their problem. In addition, you also have to ensure that regardless of how someone found any piece of content on your site, they always end up at the same URL to avoid PageRank splitting and duplicate content issues.

For example, if a specific product can be classified as both a product and a service, it makes sense that it might be listed under both categories. However, the page (URL) that the potential customer eventually lands on, regardless of which category they started in, should always be the same.

3. New Content Management System and Changing URLS

If URLs must change in the redesign due to a new content management system or back-end coding, search engines may take some time to index the new URLs as well as give them the same weighting they gave the previous URLs due to URL age factors.

Recommendation: It’s critical to 301-redirect all old URLs to their relative counterpart within the newly designed website. This will pass the link popularity of the old URLs to the new ones quickly, as well as ensure that site visitors don’t receive 404-not-found errors.

This will be easier if the new URL naming is similar to the old one, because you can use automated methods. If URLs must change completely with no correlation to the names of the old URLs, and hand-redirects are required, you’ll want to at least redirect all the top-level pages, as well as those that you’re sure receive keyword traffic from search engines. But, ideally, every URL should be redirected if at all possible.

4. Coding of Navigation Menus

Links contained within the navigation of your website should be coded in a search engine–friendly manner so that they are visible and crawlable. Some DHTML and Flash menus are invisible to search engines, which causes the pages linked within them to not receive the internal link popularity they should receive.

Recommendation: Make sure all navigational menus are coded with CSS that is visible to search engines. In addition, avoid drop-down box links as the main form of navigation (CSS mouseovers are fine). You’ll also want to ensure that all content can be reached by hard-coded links – don’t force the user to go through any kind of search box menu because those are traditionally search engine unfriendly.

5. Custom HTML Elements

While some level of automation for titles, metas, headers, URLs, and alt attributes for images can be helpful, it’s critical that your new website’s content management system allow you to create custom descriptions for these as well.

Recommendation: Make sure the content management system has fields for custom title tags, meta descriptions, heading tags, etc. There should be no limit to the number of characters allowed in these fields either, because every page may need a different number of words and characters.

6. Session IDs and Other Tracking Links

It’s best not to use session IDs to track visitors, but if your system must use them, you’ll only need to feed the “clean” URLs to the search engine spiders – otherwise, they may get caught in an infinite loop, indexing the same content under multiple URLs.

You’ll also want to avoid any sort of campaign tracking links appended to URLs because these can split your link popularity by causing your content to be indexed under multiple URLs.

Recommendation: If this type of tracking is inherent in your system, use the canonical link element to maintain one URL for every page of content.

Don’t be surprised if your developer isn’t happy to receive some of these “secrets.” He or she may feel that their authority is being usurped or their creativity is being hindered. Just remember that it’s your website that you’re paying them to create in a way that will make you the most money possible. Let your developer know up-front that these things are non-negotiable. If they tell you that they can’t do any of the above, start looking around for a new developer – ASAP!

While there will always be a few unexpected bugs to work out when your site goes live, you won’t have to be afraid of losing your search engine visitors as long as you know what you’re doing. We’ve successfully helped many companies through this transition without any glitches. At the end of the process, there’s nothing like the feeling of having your beautiful new website launched. But more than that, there’s great comfort in knowing that the people looking for what you offer will continue to be able to easily find you in the search engines.

Jill Whalen, CEO of High Rankings and co-founder of SEMNE, has been performing SEO services since 1995. Jill is the host of the High Rankings Advisor newsletter and the High Rankings SEO forum.

This article courtesy of SiteProNews.com