Webmaster Tools +1 Metrics

A nice new addition to Google's Webmaster Tools this morning is Google's +1 Metrics. These include a breakdown of:

• Search Impact
• Activity
• Audience

I believe for most website owners these pages will stay empty for quite some time. That isn't saying that the +1 won't be used, just that for a lot of smaller websites it won't be used.

It will be interesting to see the integration of +1 into the web stats, especially seeing that Google is now going to integrate the +1 into AdWords PPC ads, you can read more on that here Google +1 for PPC.

I do have a slight gripe though, and that is Google have gone to all this trouble to add these new pages to Webmaster Tools, but still haven't done anything regarding the 'benchmark' reports, which I know a lot of SEOs sorely miss.

Website Usability and its Importance

You've got you're SEO (search engine optimisation) organised for your website, but your now finding your bounce-rate has increased and you're still not getting any extra customers or sales?

You see SEO is exactly what it says it is: it is work carried out to improve the ranking of your site in the search engines: Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Ask, &c.

To ensure you can convert your surge of new visitors into customers you now have to ensure you're website's usability is user friendly, website usability covers a plethora of metrics including:

• Is the website easy to navigate: i.e. can visitors find what they want easily?
• Does it use a layout that follows website protocol: i.e. logo top left corner, search box top right, navigation left-hand-side?
• If there's a check out is it fluid: i.e. has it got the minimum amount of steps and are they clearly displayed?

Website usability is just as important as SEO, it just doesn't seem to be quite so fashionable, yet it could be the making or breaking of your website.

From Website Consultancy: ensuring your website's usability works hand in hand with your website's optimisation to improve all around performance.

Google XML Image Sitemap – Hit & Miss

When and most likely if you get around to submitting a sitemap-image.xml for your website, you’ll probably see lots of different versions of how to…

The image sitemap is pretty similar to the standard sitemap.xml that is: in its protocol as well as its mistakes. You see so many website owners think that simply running their site’s URL through a sitemap creating tool and submitting it will do the job, this is far from the truth, both sitemaps need optimising – but I’m not here to talk about standard sitemaps.



Above is the standard coding required for an image sitemap, that’s all pretty straight forward, all you need to do is insert this at the top of your notepad or whichever web editing document you prefer. Now we’ve got to insert the URL of the page:

Keywords - What are They?

What is Keyword Research
Keyword research is the process you use to find the keywords and key-phrases that are relevant to your website and will enable it to rank well in the search engines. Meaning, these keywords or key-phrases are the ones that your potential customers will use to type into the search engines to find products and services that you supply.

Why is Keyword Research so Important

Irrelevant to whether you’re a large company with a huge website or a small company with a niche website, without targeting the correct keywords and key-phrases you won’t get any visitors, or at least you won’t get many! This isn’t only relevant to natural ‘organic’ search; it’s also relevant to paid ‘PPC’ marketing. So if you’re not using carefully crafted keywords and key-phrases in you’re: Titles, Meta attributes headings and body – you’re likely to be short of visitors from the search engines.

Website Consultancy: ensuring your website operates at its optimum with website management, usability assessment, optimisation and paid advertising.

Add HTML Sitemap to Wordpress Website

I know, this is a Blogger Blog, but I'm going to give instructions on how to add an HTML sitemap to a Wordpress website.

After scouring the web and nearly giving myself a headache I found a solution, so this will hopefully save others those near headaches.

I'll ramble here a little to begin with, to make getting to the crux of the problem easier, but you're welcome to just leap to the formula below.

You see, when you find the site that provides the code for a Wordpress HTML sitemap, it gives all the information, but not quite all the information on how to implement it - this was the frustrating part.

So I was armed with the 'plugin' code and the 'shortcode' to activate the sitemap, but didn't really get the installation instructions of: "Add the shortcode to the page(s) of your choice". You see an HTML sitemap is a page alone, it shouldn't be added to specific pages, it should usually be on a page called: sitmap.php/htm/html &c.

I wanted my sitemap to be linked from the footer of every page of the site.

So to start with you'll need the 'plugin' code, which is courtesy of Angelo Mandato; there's 3 options: you can download the zip code from here, or go to the installation page, where at the top right of the page there's a big red button, or use the instructions below, which I've stated as being easier.

Being easier, I'd advise you to log-in to your Worpress Dashboard and click on 'Plugins' (left-hand menu), a little drop down menu reveals 'Add New' click here, on this page there's a search box, type in 'HTML Sitemap' and click on 'Search Plugins'. At the top of the list you'll see: 'HTML Page Sitemap', version '1.1.1' - click on install.

Okay, 1st of 3 jobs completed.

Now to create the interaction between the 'plugin' and the 'shortcode' which is [html-sitemap], you'll firstly need to click on 'Pages' (in the left-hand menu) of your Wordpress Dashboard, in the drop down menu you'll need to click on 'Add New', this will create the new sitemap page. Where it asks for 'title' enter 'Sitemap', in the 'content' box you need to add your 'shortcode', which is [html-sitemap], make sure you use square brackets. Now because you don't want this page in the main navigation, it is advisable to give it a parent, so in the 'Page Attributes' (right-hand menu), click on the 'no parent' drop down and put it under 'Other Info' or something similar, click on 'publish page'.

Okay 2nd of 3 jobs done.

Now we need to get the sitemap visible on every page of the site. Back to the Wordpress Dashboard, in the left-hand menu click on 'Appearance', the drop down menu offers the link 'Editor', click on this. In the right-hand menu of the new page all the 'Templates' are listed, go down till you find 'Footer' (footer.php), click on this and you'll see the content of your site's footer links. You will most likely have the following in the footer already:



Right after this add the following:



Naturally change the 'MYWEBSITE' to your own website and the .com to .de, .nl or .co.uk. Click on the blue button 'Update File'.

That's it job 3 of 3 completed.

Go to your website, press the 'F5' key, you may have to do this twice (that's computers for you), and in your footer you should now see your newly created link to your site's HTML sitemap, click on the link to test it, and you should find a nicely laid out sitemap indexing all your site's pages.

Now naturally you may want the sitemap to be more detailed, for this I will reference you back to Angelo's site, where he explains this further, but for me I just needed a nice clear HTML sitemap and no further headaches.

XML Sitemap Submission for Google, Bing, Yahoo & Ask

When you want to ping your newly created XML sitemap to the various search engines, you don't always want to log-in to Google, Yahoo, Bing or Ask to do so, you may just want to let them know of your updated sitemap.xml at your easiest convenience.

Therefore, here are 4 simple URL commands that will do the job for you, copy and paste the URLs into your 'notepad' or whatever editing device you use and change the 'EXAMPLE' for your own website's sitemap address, not forgetting to alter the '.com.' if you've a 'co.uk' site &c.

BING
http://rpc.weblogs.com/pingSiteForm?name=InfraBlog&url=http://www.EXAMPLE.com/sitemap.xml

ASK
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.EXAMPLE.com/sitemap.xml

YAHOO!
http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=YahooDemo&url=http://www.EXAMPLE.com/sitemap.xml

GOOGLE
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=http://www.EXAMPLE.com/sitemap.xml

Keeping a copy of the saved sheet means, every time you update your website's sitemap you only have to revisit and copy and paste 4 times or if you're really brave paste it into a Word document and launch them from there - it works!

I Can't Create Similar AdWords Reports

I signed into AdWords to use the create similar reports for my clients PPC campaigns, now these usually take a couple of minutes to generate - not last week, thanks to more tinkering from Google.

I'm not against change, and I know that anything on the web will be continually updated, but hey, Google have my email and they're happy enough to send me other useful AdWords stuff, so why couldn't they have forewarned me of this change?

Instead, my campaign and account level reports took-up unnecessary time as I trawled the web and read nonsensical forums, before I was totally clear on where to create similar reports. Only they won't be similar, because now, every month, it seems I'm going to have to reproduce them from scratch.

Yes the AdWords link to this page:

Where Can I Find My Reports

Does help, but it's the inconvenience of changing something that worked really well, for something you've got to dig through AdWords for each month to generate.

But on a better note for Google - have you seen the new Bing Webmaster Tools.

It's not that Google can do no wrong, it's the stupidity of their competition that let's them do almost what they want, which is awful for us users because they can make annoying changes to AdWords reports and the like and we basically have to tow -the-line because there is no better alternative.