Connected Well

Making your wordpress blog a little more useful to both humans and machines (and kittehs?) is important for both keeping site visitors and encouraging natural search engine traffic.

Here are some improvements I recommend, that I recently added to the Couchcast website :

1. Archives Page:
   Make sure you have an archives page in your menu bar. This should list the posts you’ve made in a way easily readable and hotlinked to the files on your site.
2. Tags Page:
   For the same reason as the archives page, if you use tags (strongly recommended) to create groupings of content on-the-fly as you post, posting a tag cloud page or other tag listing is a smart move to help people find your content.
3. Update your 404 Error page:
   Have more information on your 404 page than just “NOT FOUND” which is website speak for “You’re  stupid and we don’t like you”. A search box, your archives and tags are a great idea. Oh, and make the error text a little more human, too.
4. Can Google and Yahoo even see your website?
   You need to make sure Google, Yahoo and the other search engines know your website exists and can SEE the files inside it! These steps include getting your site submitted to the search engines, and then ensuring your Robots.txt file is not prohibiting content from being indexed (which couchcast’s was!). Also, if you use Wordpress, I recommend the Sitemap Generator plugin from Arne Brachhold.

api Tools, blogging tips blogging, SEO, website_design, wordpress, wordpress_seo, wordpress_templates, wordpress_themes

To be well-known on the Internet today, its understood that you need to be in Google.  If you’re not indexed in Google, that’s the first step to getting attention to your content.

Today, Google took some steps forward to help this process become easier:

From Submitting Your Content to Google at the Google Blog:
Last week we took two steps to address this: we updated the Submit Your Content site and we launched our Content Central blog. The goal of both of these resources is to inform and help the many organizations that distribute various types of content via Google Web Search, Maps, Product Search, Book Search, YouTube, iGoogle and more.

Over on the Content Central Blog itself, the following hint is provided for getting your content into Google:

If you’re not sure where to start, “Get Started” lists the three steps we recommend all content partners take to begin sharing information with us. Alternatively, pick an industry that most accurately describes your organization. We’ll walk you through the types of content you may have, and show you where that content surfaces across various Google services.

Go get indexed!

Rahhb Tools content, google, marketing, search engine, search engine submission, SEO, submission