Providing a sitemap to the search engines basically gives them an inventory of the pages in your site. It’s useful in helping them to find and index older and possibly orphaned content in your website that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to find.

Basic XML Sitemap Setup

• First, download the Google Sitemap module for Drupal. Upload the gsitemap folder to your Drupal installation into sites/all/modules. If the modules folder doesn’t exist, you may need to create it.
• Once you’ve uploaded the module, go to Administer | Site Building | Modules, and activate the module labelled XML Sitemap.
• Now, you’ll need to configure the module. Got to Administer | Site Configuration | XML Sitemap and set the options accordingly. By default, the “Submit To Google” option is selected, but you might also want to automatically submit to Yahoo! and Ask. In fact, I recommend it. You should also select to submit sitemap when the site is updated and when cron is run. Cron tasks in Drupal automatically perform regular maintenance on your Drupal installation. It’s recommended to set this up. (I may cover this in a later article)

Problems I Encountered During Sitemap Configuration

After following those ‘default’ steps to setup, I attempted to access my sitemap. No luck, it gave a parse error in FireFox. Upon further investigation, the file was empty. So the sitemap hadn’t been generated. If you encounter this problem, try these steps:

• Browse to Administer | Site Configuration | File System.
• In the Temporary Directory box, remove the forward-slash character from the start of /tmp. Save the new settings. You should see a notice that “The directory tmp has been created”
• Try to access your sitemap file again (should be at http://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml). This time you should see the sitemap that has been generated.
• Now that the sitemap has been created, you can force a cron run to ping Google, Yahoo! and Ask. Simply visit Administer | Logs | Status Reports and click the link that says “run cron manually”. Follow this up by viewing the Recent Log Entries Report where you should see a number of entries confirming submission to the various search engines.

For bonus points, you could (and should) configure your robots.txt file for sitemap autodiscovery.

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page.

When you do a search in Google (for example), a page of (usually 10) results is displayed to you. These results are what the search engine thinks are most relevant to your query. Results on subsequent pages may have relevance, but that becomes increasingly unlikely the further back you go.

The results displayed by any search engine are based on a number of factors. The most important is whether the content of the web page matches the words in the search query.

Other factors may include how authoritative the website is, the age of the website and how many links point to the site. Inbound links are considered a ‘vote’ for your site, which is why so many people place emphasis on link building for SEO.

Why Do I Want To Be On The First Results Page?

You want people to visit your website.

It’s a fact that the majority of searchers will find what they’re looking for on the first page of results. Obviously, the prime position is at the top of the page, among the first three results.

Search engines are a vital source of traffic for your website. If you show up in first position on page one of the results, people are much more likely to click through to your site than someone whose site appears on the tenth page of results.

So, your position in the Search Engine Results Pages is critical to the exposure and eventual success of your website.

How Do You Search?

I want you to think about how you search for information on the Internet.

How many pages of results will you wade through to find the right information? How often do the first results you find meet your needs? Do you refine your query to get better results?

If you own or run a website, you’ll see the importance of getting on that first page of results for whatever keywords drive visitors to your site. In a future guide, I’ll be looking at how you can track what search phrases people are using to find your site and how to extend content on your site.

What nofollow Does

nofollow is an attribute that can be added to links on a web page. While not directly beneficial to users, it tells search engines that the link is untrusted. As a result, search engines avoid the link.

nofollow was originally intended to prevent link spamming on community websites such as blogs and forums. Wikipedia adopted nofollow a while back because it was so easy to drop spammy links into their pages.

Google uses the number of links back to a website and the authority of the linking site as a means for calculating the importance of a web page. By using nofollow, you tell the search engine to exclude the link from that calculation – so the site gets no benefit from the link.

Now, they have decided to remove the nofollow code from any links that point to Wikia and a few other approved blogs.

Why Should You Care?

You might not think that this is a problem on the face of it, but Wikipedia has grown into a massive authority site based on the number of links back to it from other sites. Therefore, any sites that Wikipedia links to (without using nofollow) will have an immediate advantage in the search engines.

They describe this as editorial approval of links to trusted sites, but there are any number of legitimate articles from legitimate sites that could be added to a Wikipedia page. Why should they be unfairly hobbled? Because Wikimedia don’t have the resources to police every link added to Wikimedia.

I suggest that Wikipedia should adopt either a blanket application of nofollow or remove it altogether. I agree with Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal, who said:

I do not think that selective power linking to projects which make your company money is the answer and do not see much of a difference between Wikipedia’s Wikia linking practice and sites selling editorial links (links placed within editorial content) to the highest bidder.

Put simply, Wikipedia are using their PageRank strength to boost another for-profit company. They are giving their for-profit website special treatment at the expense of other quality resources.

Check out Michael Gray’s post about the dominance of Wikipedia in the search engine listings to see why this should be of concern to webmasters. As a webmaster and SEO, I’m worried that Wikipedia’s dominance even for simple common or garden keywords may make it harder for clients (or myself) to get search engine exposure with new websites. I think you should too.

Here’s the truth about getting your site listed on Google: all you need is another site to link back to you.

How Google Works

Google is a crawler-based search engine. Sounds creepy, but what this means is that Google’s technology ‘reads’ the web by following links on web pages. It then makes an index of the information it finds and uses that index to return results whenever you do a Google search.

In reality, if another public website links to you, like a trade directory or a business partner, then Google will become aware of your website through that link. Simple as that.

I think that submitting your site to Google is a bit of a placebo. Instead, concentrate on getting quality links to your site. This has more long-term effectiveness as Google counts every link to your site as a vote of quality, and the link itself will provide visitors with another way to find your site.

To hide the sidebar subscriptions list in Reader, simply press the “u” key and it’ll disappear. Press “u” again to make the sidebar reappear.

Doing this can cause the reading pane to jump about a bit, but if you’re stuck for space on a low-resolution monitor, you just might find this useful. Alternatively, go out and buy a bigger monitor.

Favourite Google Reader keyboard shortcuts at the moment are “j” and “k” to move to the next and previous posts respectively. What are yours?

Imagine it: you fall under a bus tomorrow and the next day your solicitor writes to Google requesting that your AdSense cheques are forwarded to your new address in Hades….

Seriously though, we’ve all heard the dire warnings about backing up our blogs, making sure we have recent copies of our files, databases, etc. You never think about what happens your blog though, do you?

With many people making a reasonable extra income from AdSense, it makes sense to ensure your wife/partner/whoever can access your accounts after you’re gone. Forget AdSense, if you have a popular blog, there might even be value in selling it on, which might be helpful to your wife and kids…..

Things To Record

For each site you run, you’ll probably need to write down the following:

Technical Details:

• Content Management Platform: WordPress, Drupal, whatever.
• Username and password details for CMS

Hosting Details:

• Name and URL of host. Also address of hosts administration area.
• Login details for host control panel
• FTP account details (for file backups and uploading)
• Database account details (again for backups)
• Type of hosting: LAMP or ASP.NET?

Monetization Details:

• There may be several advertising programmes in place, especially if your name’s Darren Rowse. Record the following:
• Name and URL of provider: Google AdSense, Feedburner, Amazon Affiliates, etc
• Your username and password to access the account.
• Details of payment information/PayPal accounts used to receive funds.

Hmmm. That’s about all I can think about at the moment. The benefits of recording your account information will allow you to pass on the benefits of your hard work after you’re gone. Hell, they might even pay for your funeral!

Once you’ve recorded all your site details, you’ll be wanting to keep the information somewhere safe:

…put it in a secure location like a safety deposit bank. You might even go so far as to include a list of instructions as to what to do immediately after your death, such as logging into your AdSense account and suspending payments until things get sorted out. Just make sure all the right details are there…

If I’ve missed anything, be sure to let me know!

Found via the ever vigilant Blogging Pro!