You got a website. Now what?

Transcription

1 You got a website I got a website! Now what? Adriana Kuehnel Nov.2017

2 The majority of the traffic to your website will come through a search engine. Need to know: Best practices so ensure your information will be displayed nicely. The available tools to use for your website to be listed by those search engines.

3 According to ebiz (ebizmba.com July/2017) the 6 most popular search engines are Source: engines

4 Crawling & Indexing a website The Search Engine bot (web bot or web crawler) starts at the homepage, it gathers information on that page and indexes in its database, then follows all the links. It does the same for next page(s), until it crawls and indexes all pages in a website.

5 Crawling & Indexing a website The Search Engine bot (web bot or web crawler) starts at the homepage, it gathers information on that page and indexes in its database, then follows all the links. It does the same for next page(s), until it crawls and indexes all pages in a website. Homepage Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page A Page B Page A Page D Page 2 Page B Page D

6 General guidelines to make your site search engine friendly Create unique, accurate page titles Be aware of the description Be aware of the structure of your site Best Practices Optimize the use of images Submit your website URL to search engines Indexing instructions to web crawlers Tools Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools

7 General guidelines to make your site search engine friendly Create unique, accurate page titles Be aware of the description Be aware of the structure of your site Optimize the use of images Submit your website URL to search engines Indexing instructions to web crawlers Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools

8 Page Titles are displayed in search results. Make sure you choose a title that effectively communicates the topic of the page s content For a personal website avoid Homepage. Just enter your name. Also avoid Page 1, Page 2, etc

9 General guidelines to make your site search engine friendly Create unique, accurate page titles Be aware of the description Be aware of the structure of your site Optimize the use of images Submit your website URL to search engines Indexing instructions to web crawlers Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools

10 Description is the text displayed in the search results. The meta description is a tag in HTML, that can be used to provide both search engines and users with a summary of what your page is about! If available, use it! Google Search Engine uses an algorithm to decide what to display for description (a.k.a. result snippets), it may not always use this tag. Website Builders are different from one another. In the case of the new Google Sites, the description tag is not available.

11 For Google sites the description will be based on your content and search query: A) B) C)

12 General guidelines to make your site search engine friendly Create unique, accurate page titles Be aware of the description Be aware of the structure of your site Optimize the use of images Submit your website URL to search engines Indexing instructions to web crawlers Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools

13 The structure of your website makes up the URL Create a natural flowing of hierarchy, that allows part of the URL be removed. <<domain- name>>/people/adriana <<domain- name>>/people/adriana/ <<domain- name>>/people/adriana/publications/ Avoid empty pages. <<domain- name>>/people/adriana/fieldtrips/ goes nowhere!!! <<domain- name>>/people/adriana/fieldtrips/hawaii/

14 URLs are displayed in search results Well-structured URLs offer users a quick hint about the page topic and how the page fits within the website. Google is rolling out the algorithm that displays the realworld name of the site instead of the domain name, and the URL structure of the sites in a breadcrumbs-like format. before: after:

15 General guidelines to make your site search engine friendly Create unique, accurate page titles Be aware of the description Be aware of the structure of your site Optimize the use of images Submit your website URL to search engines Indexing instructions to web crawlers Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools

16 All images can have an "alt" attribute, which you should take advantage of. In addition to provide a clear text alternative of the image for screen reader users, it helps web bots to interpret the image. The properly formatted alt text contribute to how the page is indexed and where it ranks. Google SEO Guide suggests the use of short and descriptive file names for images, but when you add an image from your Goggle drive to your Google site the URL of the image is something like this: QUh7hZaAI5DdBaP0=w673 It is highly recommended to use alt text on images when using Google sites!

17 General guidelines to make your site search engine friendly Create unique, accurate page titles Be aware of the description Be aware of the structure of your site Optimize the use of images Submit your website URL to search engines Indexing instructions to web crawlers Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools

18 Submit your site to Google

19 Submit your site to Bing Bing doesn t update their index as much as Google, so be patient. When you submit your site to Bing you will also show up in Yahoo's search results.

20 General guidelines to make your site search engine friendly Create unique, accurate page titles Be aware of the description Be aware of the structure of your site Optimize the use of images Submit your website URL to search engines Indexing instructions to web crawlers Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools

21 Webmasters have a way to control what parts of a site should not be accessed by search engine crawlers. robots.txt NOINDEX & NOFOLLOW robots.txt should not use as a means to hide web pages from search results. This is because other pages might point to those page, and they could get indexed that way, avoiding the robots.txt file. The HTML <META> tag can tell robots not to index the content of a page, and/or not scan it for links to follow. Note: The instructions cannot enforce crawler behavior to your site; instead, these instructions act as directives to the crawlers accessing your site. While Google, Bing and other respectable web crawlers obey these instructions, other crawlers might not. Do not use these tags to hide sensitive pages!

22 How to control crawling in Google Sites? We can enable or disable the setting: Request public search engines to not display my site.

23 General guidelines to make your site search engine friendly Create unique, accurate page titles Be aware of the description Be aware of the structure of your site Optimize the use of images Submit your website URL to search engines Indexing instructions to web crawlers Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools

24 Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools It allows webmasters to control how the search engine interact with their site. control the frequency of crawling creation of rich snippets site gets indexed almost immediately Get reports on crawl statistics mobile usability website issues detection of sites infected with malware Before you can use these tools you are going to have to verify ownership of the site. In Google Search Console you can do that by first turning on Google Analytics in your Google Sites.

25 Google Analytics Reports on how website users interact with your site Link Google Analytics to your Google Site >> First time users: If you already have an account:

26 Google Analytics Note: if you create another site with your same Google account and want to add Analytics to it, you will need the use the same Tracking ID. To find it, you will have to look under Tracking Info property in the Administration screen of your first site.

27 Google Search Console

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29 Bing webmaster tools To use Bing webmaster tools you need a Microsoft account, then you can register your site. Does not seem to have a way to verify ownership of a Google Site

30 Put some effort, and let those search engines work for you. Thanks for watching!