Mac SEO Blog

Getting Google and other search engines to find all of the pages on your website can sometimes be difficult. In order to get these search engines to be aware of your website, it is a good idea to create an XML Sitemap and submit it to these search engines. The following video tutorial will teach you why we do this, and how it can be done easily with Sitemap Automator. Remember to check out the SEO For RapidWeaver Video Tutorial to learn how to make your RapidWeaver website more visible to search engines.

Video Transcript

In order to get your RapidWeaver website listed in search engines, I am going to show you how to create an XML Sitemap, and submit it to the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask. We will also take it one step further by verifying our website with Google Webmaster Tools. The verification process is necessary so we can let Google know that we are the website owner and any confidential information is going to the right person or people.

First off, what is an XML Sitemap? An XML Sitemap is basically a blueprint of your website, made specifically for search engines. The Sitemap will contain the links to all visible pages on your website, so that search engines can be made aware of these links, and then index them in their search results.

To some, this process might sound somewhat complicated, but is simplified when we use a third-party tool. For this demonstration, I will be using our tool called Sitemap Automator. Sitemap Automator is available for download at www.ragesw.com
So to create your sitemap, first click on the New Sitemap button, and then type in your website URL. Next, you’ll need to click on the Create Sitemap button. Depending on how big your website is, this scanning process can take up to a few minutes. I will fast forward through this process.

When your site has been fully scanned, you can now click the Generate Sitemap button to proceed to the next step. The next thing we have to do, is upload our sitemap. Select Publish to FTP and press the Publish button. Fill in your server URL, followed by your username and password. For the Root Directory field, many of you can leave this blank, but for those who do not publish to the root directory, or have multiple websites on your hosting account, you will most likely need to type something in. For example, those who use RAGE Web Hosting, you will need to type in public_html. You can also choose to browse your server to locate the right folder to publish to. When you are done filling out all the fields, press the upload button.

After the sitemap has been published, we must then go to our Google Webmaster Tools account so that we can manually submit our sitemap. If you do not have an account, you can create a free one by going to http://www.google.com/webmastertools.

Once you are logged in, you will need to add your site by typing in the URL and pressing the continue button.

After you’ve typed in your URL and clicked continue , the next page will show us the verification method. As mentioned earlier, Google requires us to verify that we are the owners of the site so that we can be safely provided with information regarding our websites.

The first thing you want to do, is select Upload an HTML file as your verification method. Then click on the download link to download the verification file. You must know where this file is being saved in order to use it in our next step.

After you have downloaded the file, go back to Sitemap Automator, click on file in the menubar and select Publish Verification File. Then click on the Select Verification File and find the file that you just downloaded. The next step is to publish the file.

Your next step is to head back to Google Webmaster Tools and click the verify button. Once verified, you must now tell Google Webmaster Tools where it can find your sitemap. Click on your site URL, then click the plus sign next to Site Configuration. and then click on Sitemaps. Next, click the Submit a Sitemap button, and in the text box, type in sitemap.xml as you see here. Then click Submit Sitemap.

Finally, our last step, back in Sitemap Automator, click on the notify search engines button, and your sitemap will be submitted Google, Yahoo, Ask, and Bing.

Your website is ranking for keywords you may not even know it is ranking for and you can instantly boost the number of visitors you are getting from search engines with a single change to your site.

So you have your XML Sitemap file submitted to your Google Webmaster Tools account. Now, login to your account to see what search terms your website is appearing for AND what search terms people are actually clicking on to visit your site.

The trick is to find the relevant search terms that are appearing a lot in search results, but that customers are not clicking. By simply changing your Title Tag and your description tag, you can dramatically improve the number of visitors who visit your website.

Watch this step by step video tutorial to learn exactly how to do this;

Make sure you have created and submitted your XML Sitemap file. If you think you’ve missed a step and feel a little lost, we have our step by step walkthrough SEO videos which explain everything you need to know about optimizing your website for the best possible search engine rankings.

We have just released a new update to Sitemap Automator, the easiest way to get your website listed in all major search engines.

This update will now show you any broken links on your website and where they can be found on your site. Just double click a broken link and Sitemap Automator will take you to the page that contains that link.

Broken links can negatively effect both your search engine rankings and your website visitor’s experience. Ensuring all your links work correctly is the starting point of a professional website.

This update is free for registered 2.x users.

One of the things that many webmaster don’t realize is how vulnerable their website becomes when they start using social networking scripts such as forums and blogs to help build communities around their website. Although it is a very good idea to integrate these scripts on your site, when doing so you can potentially give your visitors access to sensitive parts of your website that they would normally not have

Since many blogs and forums are open source, malicious users have full access to the source code and can find vulnerabilities or take advantage of how a system works in order to gain access to protected pages on your site, spam your site, or use your site to help get your visitors to their site.

Google Webmaster Tools has always been a great way to find out if your website has been hacked by looking at the outgoing links or most common keywords. Now, Google Webmaster Tools can notify you on your dashboard if your website has been compromised. It can tell you;

1. New versions of your installed blogs, forums and other software
2. Spammy or abused user-generated content
3. Abused forum pages or egregious amounts of comment spam
4. Suspected hacking

This is very important to keep track of because if your site has been hacked Google will either remove your website completely from their search index or warn users every time they click your site in their search results. This can dramatically affect your reputation and prevent users from visiting your site.

A Google Webmaster Tools account is free to set up. You should submit your XML Sitemap file in order to get your website listed in Google and help Google’s crawler access the important pages on your website.

A question that often comes up is why a website is not yet in search engines, or if it has been added to search engines, why isn’t it showing up for the keywords I want it to. These questions can be answered by looking at the data provided by Google Webmaster Tools. By creating an XML Sitemap file and submitting it to Google Webmaster Tools, you can quickly and easily learn the answers to this questions.

This article over at SEO Chat walks you through these questions in Google Webmaster Tools and helps you answer these important SEO questions.

Some of the questions covered by the article include;

• Why hasn’t Google indexed my website yet?
• Does my site appear relevant to Google for my targeted terms or niche?
• Why am I not getting clicks from Google?
• Has my website been hacked?
• Does my website load fast compared to other websites?

Pay special attention to the last question, how fast your website loads. This will become an important search engine ranking factor in early 2010. This has been confirmed by many sources already, that is why Google provides a site speed analysis test in their Google Webmaster Tools.

Of course, you can already be ahead of the game with WebCrusher, which will instantly speed up your website so it loads as fast as possible in all web browsers.

Your meta description tag is a short description used to describe each page on your website. Although most major search engines do not use it to determine where your website ranks in their search results, they do use it in their search results to give searchers an idea of what your page is all about.

A good meta description tag can entice searchers to visit your website, over some of the other listed results. Basically it’s used to quickly grab the attention of a searcher so that they click your link in the search results.

For years, if you left out a meta description tag, or your meta description tag did not properly describe your page, Google would attempt to find more relevant snippets in your webpage content. of course, this caused a problem because now you have no control over what’s displayed in Google’s search results. Leaving it up to a computer (Google’s indexing software), means you never know whether or not it will entice people to click your link, or even if it would make sense.

Recently, Google has started doing the same thing with Title tags. Title tags are what you see at the very top of your web browser when you visit a webpage. They are probably the most important on-page optimization you can make on each of your webpages. If you leave your title tag out, or if you do not have a title tag that accurately describes your webpage, Google will attempt to change it to something more relevant. Of course, this causes the same issue with the meta description tag.

A good title tag has the following characteristics;

• It accurately describes what is one the corresponding webpage
• It is between 60 and 120 characters long
• It includes 2-3 keywords or keyword phrases that you want to rank well for
• It’s different for every one of your pages

You can watch Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, talk about this change below.

With a free Google Webmaster Tools account and XML Sitemap, Google will give you advice and feedback on all your title and meta tags. Just check your Google Webmaster Tools account and click the Diagnostics tab and then the HTML Suggestions tab on the left hand side.

For iWeb users, make sure you use iWeb SEO Tool to add unique title tags and meta tags to each of your pages to properly follow Google’s guidelines.

Google recently updated Google Webmaster Tools with an all new keyword tool. Just like before, you get a list of your most prevalent keywords on your site except now you get additional information like the significants of the keywords and where the top 10 pages that the keyword can be found on.

Just click the Keywords link under “Your web site on the web” in your Google Webmaster Tools account. You will see a list of keywords just as before, except now a new significance column is also displayed. Click any of your keywords to see how many times they occur on your entire site and the top ten pages they occur on.

One great use of this feature is to help find out if your website has been hacked, and if so, where the affected pages are.

Usually when a spammer hacks your website they will load your site up with random keywords related to what they are trying to sell. Then they will link to the hacked pages from other pages on other websites they have hacked. With this new keyword tool you can not only discover whether or not your site has been hacked (loaded with spam keywords), but you can now see exactly which pages have been affected.

The above method is used commonly on sites with community driven resources such as forums, blogs, or other social networking scripts. Always make sure this has not happened with your site with this new Keywords Tool. If it has, this is something you need to fix ASAP because it may get your banned from Google and other search engines.

Check out this new addition to Google Webmaster Tools account. Make sure you have created your XML Sitemap file and submitted to your Webmaster Tools account.

We just posed a quick fix for Sitemap Automator 2.2 that resolves an issue with publishing verification files to MobileMe.

If you use MobileMe to host your website, this is an essential update for you.

Download Sitemap Automator 2.2.1 from ur website.

You can also read about what was added to Sitemap Automator 2.2.

Now with Sitemap Automator 2.2 you can create XML Sitemaps for you very large websites. Sitemap Automator can now create XML Sitemap Index files meaning you can now submit more than 50,000 links to search engines.

This free update also includes improved support for MobileMe users with the ability to publish your XML Sitemaps to your root directory. By publishing to your root directory you will be able to see all the stats in your Google Webmaster Tools account. Also, by publishing your XML Sitemap files to your root directory on your MobileMe account, they will no longer get overwritten when making changes to your iWeb site and republishing it.

Sitemap Automator helps users get their website listed in all major search engines by creating specially formatted sitemap files, called XML Sitemaps, and submitting them to Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com.

To help you get started with the new features, a video tutorial has been created by Apptorial.com which shows you step by step how to publish your XML Sitemaps with Sitemap Automator.

We are very excited about this release and invite you to download the free version from our website and try it out.

Last Thursday, Google changed the way verification works for your website. Instead of just publishing a blank file to your web server, you now need to download a special XML file that contains important information about your account.

In version 2.1 of Sitemap Automator, you only have the option of pasting a file name in the ‘Publish Verification File’ command under the File menu. We posted a new beta version a few days ago which will now let you publish the actual verification file that Google provides.

The new beta of Sitemap Automator also includes enhanced support for MobileMe including publishing to the root directory so you no longer need to re-publish your XML Sitemap file each time you publish your iWeb site.

The beta version of Sitemap Automator can be downloaded from Trybeta. Just create a free beta testers account on the website.

If you find problems with this version, please let as know as soon as possible.