Queston about how to get the pages indexed by Google etc.

[bongobongo]

Hi.

I'm a newbie to cmsms and wonder if my pages will be indexed by Google and other search enginges?

If not, is there any workarounds to make the pages to be indexed?

Regards

[nhaack]

You can submit your page to google at any time. However, it may take some time until your page gets completely indexed.

Google Submit your page: http://www.google.com/addurl/

It is sufficient to post your home page.

What helps is to get other pages link to you, so that Google find links there as well and might start crawling your site earlier, more extensive.

Once your site is finsihed, you might want to add it to dmoz.org as well.

Hope this could give you some first ideas. The CMS with the standard templates isn't too bad already

Best
nils

[bongobongo]

Thanks for that!

So the individual pages are crawlable by Google and other search engines then, is that correct?

If the individual pages are beeing indexed by e.g. Google, without me having to submit each individual page,
then how do I add specific search words to the page?

Regards

[bongobongo]

I guess this answered my last question:

http://wiki.cmsmadesimple.org/index.php ... nt#Options

Regards

[nhaack]

Sort of ...

The actual keywords that a page ranks for are only partly defined with meta data (or when you submit the page). The single weight of a word in context of all other words is important as well. Let's say you have 100 Words in your page, telephone appears 3 times in the text, thus its weight is 3%. You should write text that roughly has 3-4% for it's major keywords. Let's say telephone is you main keyword, so alias and title should have that word in their fields as well. Put your major keywords in headings, lists, link titles... all that can help but won't do any magic. Try to rank for keywords that are not ultra competitive (as it is really hard to rank good there).

The single pages in your site are accessed by spider/crawler that jump on your index page and start following the links they find. As a result, sooner or later they will have indexed your site. The speed by which search engines index your site is determined by many factors. Your site's popularity is a major factor.

Following an extract of a draft for an article on SEO I am about to publish. It's just a draft and not very well written (and not 100% correct in all aspects) at the moment, but should provide some valuable basic information

For some time I have been having an eye on the whole SEO thingy. And as far as I can tell at the moment, the most important thing (from a technological point of view) to do is: keep your base solid.

Presenting your site in it's pure content beauty to search engines is probably the best you can do to achieve a solid SE ranking. However, I am not talking about faking/cloacking of contents or presenting the SE a different version by any black hat methods.

When you design your pages/templates, you should keep in mind that search engines are a bit like you when looking for what's important. A SE spider/robot sees different things than the regular user does. So choose style and techniques wisely when chasing for your optimal site.

Meta-Data is dead - or not

One say forget about them, others say do it. So what to do? Even if meta-data only plays a minor role in the overall raking algorythms nowadays, you should consider having them in your html/xhtml. Provide such meta elements as robots, copyright, author, title, date, description, content-language and type as well as keywords.

It is just a basic set, but it does help the search engines to better index your page. The description is often displayed together with the title as the result of a users search.

For Keywords, stick to a short selection with really relevant words. 15 words shall be enough. However, these keywords will not really help you to rank better for these words. It may be considered to a minor part by the various algorithms out there.

Document size and structure

If you have pages that are pretty large (let's say beyond 150k), you should keep in mind, that not all of your content may be indexed. So you should keep your relevant content more at the beginning of doument to make sure it will be read. Put scripts into own files and store the styling of pages in CSS files to keep the document neat and clean.

You might also want to consider to layout your site with CSS so that you have your content in the document appearing before your sidebar's content. For search engines that show content snippets or if you don't use a description meta tag, they will look within the beginning of the page for something to display.

Keyword density, prominence and proximity

Three sometimes confusing terms. let's take chesecake for example

Keyword density describes how often a word is a appearing in the content visible to search engines in percentages. The terms you want your page to rank for should appear in the content (in a meaning-full context) with an average of roughly 3-4%. So write stuff like "The taste of the cheesecake was great..." instead of "The taste was great...".

Keyword prominence describes how important a word may seem to search engines. So placing the keywords into headlines and titles (link, images) will increase a words prominence. Soo place links like "more about cheesecake recipies" instead of "read more" or text headlines like this "Ingredients for Kazakh cheesecake" insteadt of "Ingredients. Emphazising a word using or can indicate its importance to the topic.

And last but not least the keyword proximity. This one deals with the position of the kreywords within the text. Having the relevant keywords in the near surrounding of the pages start, titles and anchor texts. Especially when thinking of keyphrases a user could use you should write something like "Very delicious Cheesecake recipies.." instead of "Recipies of very delicious cheesecakes".

Templating and repetitive page elements for cms and blog driven sites

If you can implement most of the aforementioned tips into your templating system you are already well off. Try to include unique content into your repetitive elements, e.g. include a target's title in an anchor text, tale care of unique meta-data and stuff repetetive elements such as side-bars at the end of your documents structure.

A good way to tell the search engines about the relevance of the single pages is the XML sitemap. Give your actual content pages a high relevance of "1" and provide aggregating index pages with a low relevance of "0.2".  Many blogs and CMS have away to generate these.

Checking the pages' quality in regards to SEO

SEO Quake

I use the SEO Quake plug-in for Firefix for checking my keywords density. The included SEO ToolBar features a button labelled "Density" (in advanced mode) that will generate a good overview of your content in regards to keywords and keyphrases.
Text-Browsers

The text browser "Lynx" is another great way to evaluate how well your site will play with search engines. It won't display any regular stylesheets, media or execute any scripts. If you can surf your site in a way that you can access all relevant contents conveniently. Congrats, you are a big step forward.
Charles

Charles is another tool that might be helpfull. Not directly in regards to SEO but still helpfull. You can use it to track the loading times / sizes of documents and files used.
Web-Sites

There are also some web-site based tools I use from time to time. LinkVendor.com and SEOChat.com both provide some handy and interesting tools. See links below the article for some examples.

BROADCASTING

Now that the site is prepared for proper indexing we need to tell the world about us. Below a few techniques that I consider quite handy.
External Blog

Well, this is probably a border-case of white hat / black hat SEO techniques, so do not exagerate it and keep it to a level that you as a visitor would consider valuable.

Especially when your site is brand new and not well indexed, you could start a blog at blogger.com or another major blogging platform. Since blogs of such a platforms get indexed quite quickly, it can provide you a little index jump-start when you refer to your site articles from there.

I tested it with two sites that articles got indexed a few days after original posting in the blog instead of several weeks or month until the Crawlers would come again. However, for larger sites and established sites, I do not think that it will have any mayor impact.
XML Sitemap

The XML sitemap is a great way to tell all kind of visiting robots/spiders/crawlers about your sites structure and where to find the single articles. You can also use it to tell them the date of the single entries and how relevant they are within your sites context. However, it is not a tools to improve your ranking - it is rather used to tell the SE where to find what content.

As I said, it is just a draft and but it should provide you with some basic info

Best
Nils

[Pierre M.]

See Google's "guidelines for webmasters" and "tools for webmasters". (not Adword, not AdSense).

Pierre M.

[nhaack]

Definitely a good tip. Also check out their webmaster oriented blog: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/

[netfied]

Im having a problem with crawler accessing my website http://www.aeromarine.co.ke crawlers are just accessing my first page and cant crawl to the inner pages say for example http://www.aeromarine.co.ke/clearing-forwarding-agents/

I have done some test using some websites and they tell me anti bot element found. I have redone my code and the same result. can some assist.

[M@rtijn]

What makes you think the bots can't get past the first page?

Tests? On some websites? Anti bot element found?
Please try to explain your problem better.

[uniqu3]

Check your robots.txt or .htaccess file.
It is not a problem produced by CMSMS.

[netfied]

Now why does only Goran emerge to help me out? Man you are my hero.

I guess it was my .htacess but I got many errors in google webmaster dashboard. I still think the file is not yet perfect but i have been confused my many advices on the web I will have to focus on other areas before I get back at it.