Use SEO to Get Your New Site Off to a Good Start - Get Help from Google
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Google can help make your life easier – and vice versa. By all means, sign up for a Google Webmaster Central account. Google is more forthcoming these days, with services such as duplicate content reports. Paying attention to what Google can tell you may give you a competitive edge over your rivals. Of course, they may already be using it – in which case, you’d still be smart to sign up.
Another thing that will help both Google and you is building and submitting a site map. I don’t mean the kind of navigational site map that a visitor can get to from a link on your web site, though that’s a good idea too. I mean an XML site map of the sort that can help the robots from the search engines know exactly where to go to index your site. There’s an official web site set up by all three major search engines that explains the sitemap standard and how to create one. There are also many tools available for automatically generating XML sitemaps; a Google search for “XML sitemap generator,” without quotes, yields 1,780,000 hits. Many of these tools are free. Still, if you’re at all technically inclined, I’d recommend reading through the information at Sitemaps.org, so you understand the structure.
I said earlier that blogging is inappropriate for some web sites. That’s true, but it’s also true that if you’re posting some kind of content regularly, you might find it advantageous to base your CMS around a blogging system that is friendly to search engines. I’ve seen WordPress recommended as a good system for this purpose. Best of all, it is open source, so if you need to modify it to make it work for you, you can. As Mark Jackson writing for Search Engine Watch noted, “I figure if it’s good enough for Matt Cutts’ blog, it’s good enough for us to modify into a CMS.”
Another step you can take is to install Google Analytics in your web site. It’s free. You’ll have to verify your site with Google to get the data collection started. Google even has a special blog for the service, free product support, a help center and something called Conversion University with a good assortment of articles. Basically, Analytics tracks the traffic to your web site, showing you where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site. This kind of information will be invaluable over time as you grow your site and make various changes.
Next: Going for the Links >>
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