Adam DesAutels

Helping Google Crawl 101

Adam DesAutels on 08 5, 2009

The release of the U.S. Search Engine Rankings by comScore for February 2009 shows Google leading the way with 63.3% of the search queries made within the United States. Yahoo!, Google’s closest competitor, is not gaining any ground when it comes to search traffic. According to the report Yahoo! has 20.6% of the market share, less than one third of Google’s search traffic. What search engine would you like your site to show up on the front page of search results?

 

Google Webmaster Tools is a product that that will allow you to make your site more Google-friendly. Webmaster Tools allows you to determine how Google search views your site, helps you fix problems, and let’s you submit additional information to Google in order to help you improve your visibility within their search results.

 

Getting Started With Webmaster Tools

 

If you would like to take full advantage of Google’s Webmaster Tools, follow the steps provided below to register with Webmasters Tools:

 

• Go to the website Google.com

• Login to your Google account by clicking on the “Sign in” link located on the top right of the web page

• Click the “My Account” link located on the top right of the web page

• If “Webmaster Tools” is in your “My products” section, click on the link. If it is not, by default, in this section go to Google.com and Google the term “Google Webmaster Tools” and click on the first search result

• If Google asks you to enter your password, enter your password and click the “Sign in” button

• Enter your website address in the text box provided by Google

   

Verify your site

 

It is important to verify your site in order to let Google know that you are the official website owner. To verify your site you will need to know how to place files onto your server. If you don’t know how to do this, contact to your IT department or use the technical support email address supplied in the footer of each page within this book for further assistance. If you would like to do this yourself, simply follow the instructions below:

 

• Within Webmaster Tools click on the “Verify your site” link located in the tan box to the right of the light bulb

• In the dropdown menu select the “Upload an html file”

• Copy the text below the dropdown menu that looks like this: google13b450877736bb8f.html

• Open a blank text editor (Windows user use Notepad, Mac users use TextEdit)

• Click “File” > “Save As” then paste the bold text Google provided as the name of the file (Mac users select HTML from the dropdown menu before saving) then click the “Save” button

• Upload that file to your server in the same place your home page resides

• After your file has finished uploading, click the “Verify” button within Google Webmaster Tools

   

You should now see a message that says “You’ve successfully verified yourwebsite.com”.

 

Helping Google Crawl

 

If you were conducting multiple research projects on a daily basis, eight hours a day, would it be convenient if the places you frequently gather information from would tell you how often they supply new content? That would save you a massive amount of time each day and you would probably use their content more often because they are catering to your needs. There are over 100 million websites on the World Wide Web and Google is responsible for reviewing and indexing a great number of these sites on a daily basis. They appreciate when site owners give them a map of their site and that indicate how often sections of their site are updated. After submitting this information to Google, the search giant is unlikely to crawl certain pages daily that you indicated are updated monthly. With the time saved Google is more apt to crawl your pages daily that you indicated as having content that changes daily. Having pages with content that updates daily combined with Google crawling those pages more often could drastically increase the amount of visitors to your website. The more content you have on the internet that people are able to find will result in more business. Are you helping Google with their daily research project?

 

How to create your sitemap?

 

• Go to the website address www.auditmypc.com/xml-sitemap.asp

• In the “URL” textbox enter your website address (example: http://yourcompany.com)

• Towards the bottom of the page you will see checkboxes, make sure the “Exclude images” box is checked

• On the top of the page click on the “Sitemap” button

• Click the play button (like the symbol on a DVD player) located on the bottom left of the page

Note: After you run the program if scroll the window to view the right of the screen, you will notice a “Change fr.” column (second column from the right). This is where you are going to tell Google how often there are changes made to particular pages on your site. If you have content that updates daily on your home page, then alter the “Change fr.” to “daily” by clicking on the empty box on the same horizontal line as your home page (and so on).

 

• Click on the “Export” button located on the top left of the page

• Choose the “Sitemap XML” option

• Make sure the file name you save it as reads “sitemap.xml” (all lowercase)

• Decide where you would like to put it on your computer then click the “Save” button

• Upload the xml file to your server in the same place your home page resides (example web address to your site map should look something like this: www.yourcompany.com/sitemap.xml

 

How to submit your sitemap?

 

• Log into your Google Webmaster Tools account

• Click the “Add” link located under the “Sitemap” link in the middle of the page

• Click on the “Add a Sitemap” link located in the middle of the page

• Submit your sitemap by typing in “sitemap.xml” in the textbox and hit the “Submit Sitemap” button

   

Congratulations you are now helping Google know what to look for and where to look within your website. Your sitemap should be approved within 24 hours (it could be less that 5 hours). While you wait take some time and get familiar with Webmaster Tools. Check out the tabs on the left of the Webmaster Tools page (Settings, Diagnostics, Statistics, Links, Sitemaps, and Tools) and determine how you can use this information to make your site more Google-friendly.

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