Pleasanton Web Design

I logged onto my 1&1 Internet Control Panel last week and noticed a new category: Marketing Center. One of the items in that category was “Google Webmaster Tools.” “Excellent,” I thought to myself.

The 1&1 Internet Google Webmaster Tools feature consists of an automated script that generates a file called google_sitemap.xml.gz, which is a compressed xml sitemap file, for the selected domain. It also submits it to Google for you.

The sitemap creation dialog gives you the following options to customize your sitemap file:
-Directory Selection
-File Category Selection
-Excluded Files

Once submitted you can update your sitemap once a day, and it will be resubmitted through the control panel. That’s about it.

This is a really stripped down version of Google Webmaster Tools. If you are just starting out, and want to get sitemaps up quick and easily, 1 &1′s Google Webmaster Tools feature could be the way to go for you. If you want more control over your sitemap and more detailed information on your sites performance and Google’s indexing of it, I’d recommend opening up a Google Account, and downloading GSiteCrawler sitemap generator.

Check out my cool new Technorati tags at the bottom of my post. Wanna know how I got ‘em? Do ya? Well:

1. First I downloaded Firefox (ok, I already had it, but you can download it by clicking the link at the to of the page!).

2. Next I downloaded Greasemonkey – It’s a Firefox extension that allows you to run user scripts on any webpage to add functionality. For example you could add cool Technorati tags to the end of your blog posts.

3. The user script you want to use in your Mozilla browser, enabled by Greasemonkey is called Magical Sheep. Click on the button, open your Blogger Beta, and voila, you can now add ultra-neato technorati tags like you see below.

Already have a Google Sitemap? Why not submit it to Yahoo too? First you’ll need to set up a Yahoo account and authenticate your site, much like you would on Google. Set up your site here:

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ (see my post on Yahoo Site Explorer)

Once your site has been added, they accept sitemap submissions here:

https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

Once logged in, here’s what you’ll see:

Whereas Google asks you to enter your sitemap, but you can also enter your site feed, Yahoo asks you to enter your site feed, but you can also enter your sitemap. They just have to be different. Individual. Unique.

>

Once your sitemap is entered (or site feed, for you bloggers), you’ll be taken to your feed page, which looks very similar to the sitemaps page in Google Webmaster tools:

Like Google Sitemaps, it allows you to resubmit at will, and shows you when you last submitted, and when it was last uploaded:

I’ve heard talk the MSN will also accept sitemap submission in the near future. I’m waiting.

I’ve only been seriously blogging for a few months now, although I published my first post in 2004. I’ve learned a few things and taken some missteps, and I thought I’d share them with you. I’m not at the top of the learning curve , so please take that into consideration as you read.

The following tips assume that you are writing blog posts with the intent of drawing maximum readership. They cover factors that are on-page. Off-page factors will be covered in part two.

1. Forget about Google for the first 6 months. They are very snobby and won’t care about your blog at first. I used to think there was such a thing as optimizing for particular search engines. Now I have a pretty standard set of rules, based on quality content and putting the right keywords in the right places. If you do try to figure out algorithms and tweak your blog posts accordingly, concentrate on MSN and Yahoo for the first 6 months to a year.

2. Your main page is where it is happening. When you are first starting out, with a piddly page rank of 2 or 3, your main page is going to have the best shot at showing up in the SERPs. After the posts fall off the main page, they are much less likely to get hits. I’m still experimenting myself, but suffice it to say, don’t set your posts to drop off from the main page too quickly.

3. Start multiple blogs. If you think you may want to blog on many or a few different subjects, don’t put everything on one blog. The last thing you want is a big mish-mash of different subject matter, which will dilute your targeted content. As stated above, it takes a while for the big-boy search engine, Google, to see you as an established presence, so think things out and start as many blogs as you think are necessary to they can each get their own page rank, and when you are finally ready to roll and start gaining some blogging momentum, you’ll have several venues with decent visability, instead of just one.

4. Just start writing. When I first started blogging, I had no idea what I wanted to say. Writing a post was like pulling teeth. Gradually, however, as I gained practice at putting my thoughts to words, and seeing which type of subjects made good posts, writing because more effortless. You have to start though. Just do it. Pay your dues. Just delete your early practice posts when you start getting traffic, or you could be in for a bit of embarrassment.

Yesterday I wrote a post entitled Technorati Ping Problems on another blog. It described a problem I was having with a new blog promotion service I started using recently, Technorati. Information for one of the three blogs I have registered with them (this one) was majorly wacky.

I just received an email from Technorati support saying they made a “small adjustment” and everything should be working now. Sure enough, everything is looking good. My latest posts are up there, showing my index as updated 6 hours ago rather than 393 days. I emailed them just yesterday, so I’m impressed with their response time. Hopefully the problem is truely solved and I won’t be needing “small adjustments” on a regular basis.

Technorati appears to be a very useful and powerful service. They do have a problem related to pinging some blogs, but they are handling it. I think I’ll keep them

As a result of attending the Silicon Valley Webguild’s Web 2.0 event at Google last week, I decided to spend some time this past weekend exploring some of the social networking and tagging sites that have been exploding since the whole Myspace shiznit hit the fan. I was amazed to see how bad the usability of some (not all) of these sites is.

If someone were ever to ask me the best single thing they could do to make their Website user-friendly, I’d say this:

Describe what you do on the homepage.

What is this Website? What can I do on it? Pretty simple. When I see a Website that does not follow this rule-of-thumb, I immediately assume they did not use a well-thought-out design process to build their site, and instead slapped it up there fast and cheap. I don’t have time to waste searching for what they do. I’m going to move on. exit page = entry page. pageviews = 1.

I’ve heard rumors about posts on Blogspot.com being deleted without the author’s consent. I first heard of this in a website marketing article. I haven’t been able to find any more specific information on what the author of the marketing article was talking about, but decided to start a WordPress blog on my business Website design site, in order to compare and contrast. The new TP Designs Website Design Blog is at http://www.tpdesigns.net/wordpress and will contain news about services, technology and special offers.

Ok, I panicked. The GSiteCrawler Website is back up, and my download completion dialog just interrupted my typing. They may have been updating the Website, because there seems to be a lot more info on it than the last time I was there. All good.

I just tried to fire up my GSiteCrawler program to update one of my Google Sitemaps and was informed via dialog box that my copy is only good until today, and I should go to http://johannesmueller.com/gs to download the current version. That URL redirects to http://gsitecrawler.com, which is now an empty page.

GSiteCrawler was an excellent, easy to use tool, and now it is gone. Whatever will I do. I guess it’s back to the Google Python program for now.

A couple of posts back I had a minor hissy-fit rant about the continued lack of relevance of my Adsense ads. A month ago it was all Bottlecaps, all the time. So I changed the name of my blog from Bottlecap Napkin, and filtered some URLs for bottle cap factories, and all was well. Then as the Christmas season approached – zing – my blog was Christmas tree spam central. Well I ranted and was busted by no less then Adam Lasnik, SEO Strategist for Google. The same Google I had just called bastards, collectively (tongue-in-cheek, of course). Adam was kind enough to point me to feature of Adsense called section targeting (you can read Adam’s full comment in my post Damn Google Adsense (Again)!!!).

The concept is simple enough. In the source code for your Web page, just wrap comments around the content you want the ads to pick up on like this:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>
Your good content here
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

You wrap the content you want ignored by Adsense in comments like so:

&lt!–google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore)–>
Your bad content here
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

For more info check out Google’s Adsense Help Center article on section targeting.

In this way you can suggest to Google which content you want your Adsense ads to target, and which you want them to ignore. So the next time my blog is crawled, I’m looking for a sidebar without Christmas tree ads. That will be my Christmas present from Google.