IT

Search engines Webmaster Tools

Every search engine provides webmaster tools that give detailed information and statistics about how they see and crawl your website. In order to access most of the features you need to register your site with them. The major webmaster tools are:

• Google Webmaster Tools, you need a google acount to use this;
• Yahoo Site Explorer yahoo acount needed;
• Bing Webmaster Center Live! acount needed;
• Alexa.com, quickly see how popular a site is and view a detailed traffic analysis, such as an estimate of the percentage of Internet users who visit the site each month;
• Bizinfor, similar to alexa;
• Google AdWords Keyword Tool good for a quick keyword analysis;

Tips

A great resource is Google's Search Engine Optimization pdf article.
Important search engines/systems:

• Google;
• Yahoo!;
• Bing;
• Open Directory Project, a large directory of Web sites, actually owned by AOL although volunteer run. It’s very important, because its data is “syndicated” to many different Web sites, providing you with many links back to your site;

Check if your site is indexed:

• on google:
  Search on google:
  site:domain.com (don't inlcude the www part, only the domain).
  This will return how many and which pages Google has indexed on your site;
  
  You can also check if google has cached any of your pages (note: if it didn't cache any it doesn't mean they aren't indexed):
  cache:http://yourdomain.com/page.htm
  
• on yahoo!:like on google just type:
  site:yourdomain.com
  
  For the yahoo! directory:
  - go to the directory search site (dir.yahoo.com)
  - type your site's domain name (without http://www.): yourdomain.com
  - ensure that the Directory option button is selected and click Search
  If your site is registered the search will reveal your site.
  Note: You have to pay to get a commercial site into the Yahoo! Directory.
  
• on open directory project:
  Just type the domain name, without the www. piece.
  If your site isn't registered it should be. Register it.

After this if your site doesn't show on the search engine result there can be two reasons:

1. The search engines haven’t found your site yet;
2. The search engines have found your site, but can’t index it;

Check if your site can be indexed:
Your site may be invisible to search engine indexation for multiple reasons:

1. The site is using some kind of navigation structure that search engines can’t read, so they can’t find their way through the site.
   For example: the navigation is done with Javascript so search engines can't read the navigation links (search engines ignore javascript).
   Ex. this is ignored: <SCRIPT TYPE=”javascript” SRC=”/menu/menu.js”></SCRIPT>
   
   Suggestions:
   - add a sitemap page on your site. The sitemap should include most of your site pages and include a link to the sitemap on the bottom of each page. In 2005, Google introduced a new concept, the XML sitemap, and was quickly followed by Yahoo!, and  MSN Live Search. This file is placed into your Web site’s root directory containing a list of links to all your pages so the search engines can more easily find them;
   - include/duplicate navigation links at the bottom of each page;
2. The site is creating dynamic pages that search engines choose not to read.
   And example of this issue is the use of multiple querystring parameters on the url of your site:
   - page.php (OK);
   - page?id=3 (OK at least for google);
   - page?id=3&xpto=54&someVar=23 (Can cause problems, especially for session ids passed in querystrings);
   
   Suggestions:
   - Try limiting the url parameters to only one, although nowadays google seems to index multiple ones correctly;
   - Use a “URL rewrite” technique. This is webserver dependent, but for Apache the mod_rewrite controls this and on Windows server the ISAPI Rewrite do the same thing. For more info about this look here and here.

Pick good keywords for you site
This section is about the words people are using at search engines to search for Web sites.
A good tool to test and discover good keywords for you site is the Google AdWords Keyword Tool.
It will show you how often a term and related terms are used by people searching on Google and partner sites.

Make your Web pages “search engine–friendly”

• Sites using frames don’t index well. There are some workarounds but avoid using frames;
• The <TITLE></TITLE> tag is very important:
  - it should be inside the head section of your html and appear only once per page;
  - if the title is poor (don't contain the proper keywords) you wont get good result;
  So: your TITLE tags should be immediately below the <HEAD> tag and should contain useful keywords. Have around 40 to 60 characters between the <TITLE> and </TITLE> tags (including spaces) and, perhaps, repeat the primary keywords once. 
• The DESCRIPTION tag is also very important because search engines often index it (assuming that the description describes the contents of the page).
  This tag should come immediatly after the TITLE tag and provide a keyworded description of up to 250 characters (including spaces);
  <META NAME=”description” CONTENT=”description here”>
• Prefer text instead of images/flash. Search engines cant read images or flash text;
  - place keywords into heading tags (<H1> <H2>, etc.);
  - put keywords into bulleted lists;
  - use bold and italic on keywords;
  - provide descriptive links with keywords. Ex "product xpto" instead of "click here";
  

Resources:

• Search Engine Optimization by Google;
• Webmaster Tools with Wordpress (Oficial Wordpress support);
• Use Webmaster Tools with blogger;
• Blog about SEO;