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Webmastering (Search Engines 201)
Webmastering Checklist:
Create Your Search Engine Accounts
At this point, you have probably submitted your site to the three major search engines as described on the Search Engines 101 page. This will get your site indexed faster than doing nothing at all, but it still involves a waiting game. Also, it can take the SE's several weeks to get around to your site again and index any additions or changes you might have made. The solution is to establish a direct relationship with the search engines and provide them with a tool to speed up this process. This tool is a search engine compliant sitemap. This is not the same as the Sitemap page you were provided when you opened your Office Live site account. It is an XML coded file that provides the search engines with information about your site and its pages.
If you have not done so already, the first step is to create webmaster accounts with the three search engines. Use the Sign Up or Sign In links:
Organize Your Navigation
The next step is to set up your navigation structure. This will define the importance of your pages. Parent pages are more important than Child pages. Open the Page Editor and click on Navigation. Select the page in the left pane. In the center of the dialog is a Place Page Under: drop-down. Select <Top Level> to indicate a Parent page. To make the page in the left panel a Child page, select it's Parent in the drop-down. Also designate the page order using the Move Up and Move Down options. Do this even if you don't use the built-in navigation as is the case with this site. In Page Properties, you must also check the box for Show this page in the Navigation bar.
The SoftPrizm© Search Engine Sitemap
If you search the web, you will find a number of XML sitemap generators available, and many are free. These assume your site was built in the traditional manner, with hard coding or using one of the commercial website editors. If you are using the Office Live site builder, yours is not a traditionally built website. A standard sitemap generator will not produce the results you need.
SoftPrizm has accommodated our needs and produced a sitemap generator which creates a proper XML file for Office Live websites. To get started, visit the SoftPrizm site and click on the OLSitemap link. You will receive your sitemap as a packaged solution with clear instructions for installing it into your OL site account. SoftPrizm also provides instructions for getting your site verified with the three search engines. This includes a metatag generator to convert your verification code to the metatag format. Finally, you will get instructions for submitting your OLSitemap. I am using SoftPrizm's OLSitemap on this site, so I can confirm the results. Google is crawling this site almost daily. Once the OLSitemap was submitted, Yahoo had the site indexed in 24 hours. If you work carefully, you can successfully complete the entire process in about two hours.
Tip: If you submit the OLSitemap to all three search engines, Google, Bing and Yahoo, do not separate the three verification metatag strings with commas and/or spaces. This adds characters rendering the tags unusable. Just run the three tags together in the keyword pane. If you are also using a favicon tag, keep it last in the list.
Google Analytics©
My friend StudioAllen offers great instructions for adding Google Analytics (GA) to your website. This will provide fascinating and useful information about how and where your site is performing on the net. I will just summarize the steps here. Visit his Solutions for Office Live website for complete directions. You will also find instructions for search engine verification on his site.
Step 1: Open a Notepad on your computer and copy and paste this code. Save it on your desktop where you can get to it easily. Leave the gap in the middle.
Step 2: Log into your Google account and sign up for Google Analytics. Select the "ga.js" method. You will be provided code with elements that look like this. Return to the Notepad and copy and paste this code into the gap of the code you saved in Step 1. The result will look like this which is what you will paste onto your pages.
Step 3: You will use a Custom Footer Module for adding the code to each web page you wish to analyze. Find it in the Modules drop-down in the Page Editor. StudioAllen instructs positioning it as the very last element in the last zone on the page. Highlight the entire content of the dialog box and delete it. Now copy and paste the complete code you created in Step 2. Save the page. Repeat this for each page. At this point, you can just select and copy the module from one page to the next. Don't worry if it looks empty, that's normal.
GA reports site activity through the previous 24-hour period. Wait a day or two, log into your Google account, then » My Account » Analytics. You should begin to see activity in the multifaceted report page. Each section has a link to more detailed information.