SEO Information from Internet Marketing Professional, Hari Krishna D

Once you are done creating an XML sitemap listing all the pages to crawl and to be indexed, you want to make sure that the search engines see it and index your site, Know how easy to submit an XML sitemap to the Major Search Engines' Webmaster Centrals/Tools.

Webmaster Tools - Google - www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

A. Login to your Google account and go to Google Webmaster Central.

B. Add your site to Google by filling in your URL and the URL of your sitemap by clicking on 'Add a site'.

C. Google will ask for a verification file/code to be added to your doamin for the owner's user authentication.

D. Once added, Google will check the sitemap and begin indexing your site as soon as it's determined that the sitemap has no errors.

Yahoo! Site Explorer - siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

A. Login to your Yahoo! account and go to Yahoo! Site Explorer.

B. Add your site to Yahoo by filling in your URL and Click "Add My Site".

C. Yahoo will take you to a page where you will see the verification file/code to be added to your doamin for the owner's user authentication.

D. Once added, Yohoo! will check the sitemap and begin indexing your site as soon as it's determined that the sitemap has no errors.


Bing Webmaster Center - http://www.bing.com/webmaster/

A. Login to your Windows Live account and go to Bing Webmaster Center.

B. Add your site to Bing by filling in your URL by clicking on "Add Site".

C. Bing will take you a site verification code page, will ask for a verification file/code to be added to your doamin for the owner's user authentication.

D. Once added, Bing will check the sitemap and begin indexing your site as soon as it's determined that the sitemap has no errors.


Please have a look at the sample dash boards for more details on how and where to submit. Do not hesitate to Contact Me for any Queries/help in setting up the dashboards.

Google Webmaster Central Blog posted a video on how to make the most of the features of the Google Webmaster tools.

The video maily focuses on the main features of the Google Webmaster tools highlighted below:

• Sign up for Email Forwarding
• Check out Search Queries
• Use Keywords to Target Content
• Reduce Duplicates Through HTML Suggestions
• Diagnose Crawl Errors to Fix Broken Links
• Prioritized Content Through Internal Links
• Verify Access Through Fetch as Googlebot
• Site Performance Feature to Improve Page Speed

Watch the Video:


{Via Google Webmaster Central Blog}

We all know the use of Robots.txt file -
* To control the crawling and indexing of the web pages (By disallowing the files, folder)
* To let the Google know about the Site pages by including the XML sitemap link

To gain more knowledge on how Google's crawler, Googlebot, handles conflicting directives in your robots.txt file, To know how to prevent a PDF file from being indexed along with lots of other information about controlling the crawling and indexing of your site, are now available on code.google.com:

Now we can have a comprehensive resource and learn about robots.txt files, robots meta tags, and X-Robots-Tag HTTP header directives.

{Via Google Webmaster Central Blog}

So far we are creating a video sitemap for video files, Image sitemap for Images and Web sitemap for Web pages. But now we can  submit your various content types (video, images, etc.) in one Sitemap. If your site contains videos, images, mobile URLs, code or geo information, you can now create—and submit—a Sitemap with all the information.

Site owners have been leveraging Sitemaps to let Google know about their sites’ content since Sitemaps were first introduced in 2005. Since that time additional specialized Sitemap formats have been introduced to better accommodate video, images, mobile, code or geographic content. With the increasing number of specialized formats, we’d like to make it easier for you by supporting Sitemaps that can include multiple content types in the same file.

The structure of a Sitemap with multiple content types is similar to a standard Sitemap, with the additional ability to contain URLs referencing different content types. Here's an example of a Sitemap that contains a reference to a standard web page for Web search, image content for Image search and a video reference to be included in Video search:

Hope every Webmaster will save time and also taking out different files to make a single sitemap file.

{Via Official Google Webmaster Central Blog}

Today, Google Posted Answers the Webmaster Quiz answers! Tthis quiz has provided some clarity on common issues users ask about in the Webmaster Help Forum. Few of the questions and answers are posted here.

1) You have moved your site to a new domain name. For users and search engines, the preferred way to permanently redirect traffic is:

Correct answer: a) 301 redirect

Explanation: A 301 redirect is preferred because it tells search engines, "Ok, this is the new domain I want you to show to users from now on," as opposed to something like a 302 redirect, which tells search engines, "Hey, this is only a temporary redirect--so, uh, I might change the URL soon, okay?" In addition to implementing a 301 redirect, the Change of Address feature in Webmaster Tools can help Google find your new site.

2) Your server is going to be moved and unavailable for a day. What should you do?

Correct answer: c) Return "Network Unavailable (503)" with a helpful message to all requests

Explanation: Maybe not as commonly known to webmasters, but very useful if your site is down! This tells crawlers to come back later, rather than crawling and indexing your "Down for maintenance" pages when you respond with 200 rather than 503. Check out the Help Center to learn more about HTTP status codes.

3) Your website is not in the index five days after you've put it online; what should you do?

Correct answer: b) Continue working on the site

Explanation: This one is a bit tricky. There could be a number of reasons why your site is not indexed. For example, a site's robots.txt file may contain a directive to inadvertently block crawlers from searching its contents. But the main take-away from this question is that if your site is pretty new, it may just be a matter of time before it gets indexed. You should continue to focus on improving your site for your users.

6) You need to remove 192 PDF files from the /private-files/ folder which have gotten indexed. What's the fastest way to do this?

Correct answer: d) Disallow the folder in robots.txt and request removal of the whole folder in Webmaster Tools.

Explanation: Before removing a directory that you don't want indexed, you need to include the Disallow directive in your robots.txt file to tell search bots not to crawl it anymore.

9) You have a country-coded domain name called example.es. To associate your site with Spain, you need to:

Correct answer: c) None of this is necessary. Google should already associate a domain ending in .es with Spain.

Explanation: Some country-coded domains may overlap with international ones, like .tv--which could also be a site from Tuvalu. But these sort of cases are rare and if they do arise, don't be shy to seek out help on the forum.

{Via Google Webmaster Central}

Google has lately been prone to changing its own logo, often turning it into a series of doodles with a riddle attached. It seems we’re about to see another series of logo changes, but this time their purpose is quite easy to discover.

If you’ve visited Google (Google) today, you may have noticed that Google logo has turned into a holiday postcard. Clicking on it leads to a “Happy Holidays” landing page, with the current logo listed as the first in a series.

What can we say; thanks, Google, we wish you happy holidays, too!

{Via Mashable}

There are a number of SEO tools online. Here i am listing out a few useful when analyzing a client or competitors website. I will use specific tools depending on what type of data I am looking to analyze. These tools can save you a lot of time when researching links, on-page/off-page SEO, social media and site analytics.
Best of all.. each of these tools all free! I use only paid tool WordTracker.

Performance overview:



The performance overview shows a graph of the aggregated speed numbers for the website, based on the pages that were most frequently accessed by visitors who use the Google Toolbar with the PageRank feature activated. By using data from Google Toolbar users, you don't have to worry about testing your site from a location that your users do not use. For example, if your site is in Germany and all your users are in Germany, the chart will reflect the load time as seen in Germany. Similarly, if your users mostly use dial-up connections (or high-speed broadband), that would be reflected in these numbers as well. If only a few visitors of your site use the Google Toolbar, Google may not be able to show this data in Webmaster Tools.

The line between the red and the green sections on the chart is the 20th percentile — only 20% of the sites are faster than this website. This website is pretty close to the 20% mark, which pages would Google have to work on first?

Example pages with load times



In this section you can find some example pages along with the average, aggregated load times that users observed while they were on your website. These numbers may differ from what you see as they can come from a variety of different browsers, internet connections and locations. This list can help you to recognize pages which take longer than average to load — pages that slow your users down.

As the page load times are based on actual accesses made by your users, it's possible that it includes pages which are disallowed from crawling. While Googlebot will not be able to crawl disallowed pages, they may be a significant part of your site's user experience.

Keep in mind that you may see occasional spikes here, so it's recommended that you watch the load times over a short period to see what's stable. If you consistently see very large load times, that probably means that most of your users are seeing very slow page loads (whether due to slow connections or otherwise), so it's something you should take seriously.

{Via Google Webmaster Central Blog}