June 29th, 2007 | Filed under Search Engine Optimization
At the request of a reader, a blast from the past - a 2003 SEO article that’s way dated, but still has some good points. Help the Googlebot understand your web site
Search Engine Optimization category archive
July 20th, 2006 | Filed under Search Engine Optimization
If just regular ol’ Google juice isn’t argument enough, Google Accessible Search is a good way to convince your clients their pages should be as semantic (read: textual and meaningful stripped of style, images and Flash foofery) as possible.
Yahoo! Japan Most popular blog
November 8th, 2005 | Filed under Search Engine Optimization
Technorati is listing Yahoo! Japan as its most popular “blog,” right now, above BoingBoing. Bug? Inside joke? Who knows.
Google Sitemaps
November 5th, 2005 | Filed under Search Engine OptimizationGoogle Sitemaps looks really cool. From what I can see of it, you submit an XML document which defines a map of your site - page locations, their update frequency and priority - and the Googlebot indexes as you specify (though Google doesn’t make any promises, presumably to discourage spammers and rogue SEOers). Looks like they’re going to provide site stats based on sitemaps as well.
I told the MSN Search team last month that tools for web publishers - like stats, popularity rankings of pages, configurable internal site search - would be the killer app that would get site publishers to adopt and spread a particular brand’s search box. Looks like the big G is headed in that direction.
And! They’re accepting pings when a site changes!!
Robots.txt Generator
October 25th, 2005 | Filed under Essential Tools, Search Engine OptimizationThis robots.txt file generator is super-useful. I came this close to writing one of these myself back when I wrote Help the Googlebot understand your web site but I never got around to it.
Robots.txt Generator [McAnerin Networks Inc]
How to use the robots META tag
September 1st, 2005 | Filed under PHP, Code snippets, HTML, Search Engine OptimizationThe robots <meta> tag in the <head> of your web page tells well-behaved robots (like the Googlebot) whether or not to index a page and whether or not to follow links on a page. For bloggers and zine publishers, robots should only index the permanent locations of posts, not the ever-changing front page or archive pages.
To use meta tags to direct the Googlebot to your permalinked post locations, insert the following in the <head> on your front page and archive pages:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />
That says, “Hey bot, don’t index this page, but follow the links.” You don’t want these pages indexed because they will change every time you post to your site. The posts’ permanent locations, which should be linked on your front page, will never change however, and so the robot should follow the links and index them. Those permanent locations of your posts should have the following in the document:
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />
Alternately, if you don’t want the links in your posts followed but you do want your posts added to the search engines’ indices, use:
<meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow" />
To achieve this in a WordPress template or any PHP page where $single is set if you’re viewing a single post’s permalinked location, insert the following into the templates that include <head> tags:
<meta name="robots" content="<?php echo (!$single?'no':''); ?>index,follow" />
HTML Author’s Guide to the Robots META tag [robotstxt.org]