A Brief Guide to Search Engine Services and Tools
In order to lead internet publishers in the right direction in terms of accessibility and content, the big name search engines have all created services that help to guide webmasters. Each search engine provides different services and advice, but they’re all worth paying attention to. If nothing else, they give a valuable insight into what it would be necessary to accomplish to succeed in their eyes, and for that reason we’re going to advise you on how to approach their material.
Most good search engine optimisation services pay attention to the content of advice pages provided by search engines without falling into the trap of thinking they’re telling us everything we need to know. If nothing else, the search engines are providing you with free SEO tools and you should take advantage of that. We have to assume that the big name search engines know more than anyone about SEO link building, search engine optimisation tools and online SEO tools, it’s just that they’ve not been very free with the information until now.
We recommend that you take note of what they suggest you do, since they’re the ones you’re trying to please in order to reach your audience. There are some common themes in all the SEO literature provided by the search engines, and here are some points you should certainly address.
Good Practice
Feature sitemaps. All of the major search engines recommend that you feature a sitemap. A sitemap will enable users and search engines alike to navigate your site with ease. There are some different ways of creating a sitemap, and you should be aware of them and how your choice of which to use will affect your performance.
Choose a Format
XML is the format most often recommended. XML stands for Extensible Mark-up Language and it’s very easy for search engines to read sites that are created using XML. They have the disadvantage of featuring very large files which can prove to be a hindrance. RSS sitemaps can be read easily as well, and can easily be created to update automatically when fresh content is introduced to the site. They are harder to manage than XML sitemaps due to this updating process. Text based sitemaps may be the simplest version recommended by search engines. They do not allow as much scope for adding Meta tags, but there are benefits to keeping things simple. If all the search engines are telling you to have a sitemap, it would seem very foolish not to, especially given the fact that users like them. Our advice is to make one and to make it using one of the three methods here.
Get Technical
Use the text file provided for robots. The robots.txt file acts as a visitor’s guide for automated travellers to your site, and this means those sent by search engines to crawl the internet and send back information about what they find. This information is used to index your site, and it’s therefore crucial for SEO. It’s precisely these robot crawler programs that will be travelling along the links to and from your sitemap, for example. It’s a very wise idea to follow the advice of search engines to provide well for your visitors in these files. Use the commands at your disposal. The ‘disallow’ function ostensibly allows you to prevent robot crawlers from accessing specific pages or folders. This is important if you want to let a search engine know that duplicate text within your site is for printable versions etc. It pays to remember that not all robots are good robots. Some are sent by unscrupulous web users to steal information. For this reason you should be wary of what you include in your robots.txt file.
Conclusion
The three main services provided by the big name search engines are Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Center. It’s a very good idea to check them all out with a view to improving your search engine optimization. Learn about what they’re telling you to do in terms of what we’ve mentioned here, but bear in mind such common issues as backlinks, outbound links, keywords and feeds as well. Get advice from a good search engine optimisation company about ways of implementing the strategies they suggest without compromising your existing or planned SEO methods. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that search engines are generously giving you any information that will privilege your site above any others!
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