Basic SEO Training for Site Admins and Webmasters IV
Submitting Your Blog To Yahoo! Site Explorer
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
Yahoo! is another major search engine serving many users. By submitting to Yahoo! Site Explorer you are ensuring that your blog or site will be regularly visited by Yahoo’s spiders to track changes on your pages and to update you on any errors found on your site.
Step 1: Go to the Yahoo! Site Explorer homepage and submit your blog’s URL. You need to be logged into your Yahoo account for this.
After this you will be led to the dashboard where you need to Authenticate ownership of your blog or website. Similar to Google Webmaster Tools, you will either need access to your site’s server to upload an empty HTML file or you can choose to place a meta tag key into the HEAD section of your blog’s template.
Copy the meta code given and paste it into your blog.
Just click on the Ready to Authenticate button to complete the process.
Submitting Your Blog or Website To MSN’s Live Search
The third major player in the search engine industry is MSN which is owned by Microsoft. It has been steadily improving its search services to keep pace with Google and Yahoo by way of quality of search results and the efficiency of its crawling and indexing of websites.
Just like Google and Yahoo, MSN Live Search is also a crawler-based search engine and makes use of the Sitemap Protocol. You don’t need to resubmit your blog again and again. Instead you can either create an XML file and upload it to your website’s root folder or you can embed a META tag key inside your blog’s template.
To submit your blog to MSN Live Search go to this URL: http://webmaster.live.com/
You need to have a Windows Live ID for this. If you have a Microsoft Passport, Hotmail, Messenger or MSN account you can use your username and password to log in. Otherwise, sign up here for your Hotmail account to use as your Windows Live ID.
MSN Live Search’s Webmaster Center is similar to Google’s Webmaster Central wherein webmasters can submit their sites for easier and faster tracking by search engine bots. Here are screenshots of pages where you can submit your website’s or your blog’s URL and the following pages for the Site Validation process.
Please select the validation method that uses a META tag key instead of the XML file option. Copy the code and then paste it into your blog’s template the same way you did with the Google and Yahoo META tag keys.
Once validated MSN Live Search will start tracking data from your blog or website. Examples of data are the keywords that lead users to your pages and the number of sites linking back to your site.
Google Analytics: Tracking Site Statistics and Analyzing Them
Google Analytics is one of the services of Google that helps bloggers and webmasters track down statistics for their site. Information such as the number of unique visitors each day, the keywords that the site or blog ranks high for, or the specific pages which the most number of people visited are essential in knowing how effective your optimization efforts are and how well the site is put together.
Go To the Google Analytics Homepage
To access Google Analytics you need to be logged into your Google Account. You will be led to a signup page and you need to fill in the required information. Submit your blog URL as indicated. You can add as many website profiles as you want as long as the tracking codes are effectively in place for the analytics bots to read.
Copy the code and paste it into your blog’s template. But this time, you must place the code before the closing </body> tag. You will need to click on the Check Status button for the analytics bot to start tracking data.
Additional Learning Resources for Website Analytics:
Lesson1: What is Web Analytics?
Lesson 2: Where are my Visitors Coming From?
Lesson 3: Search Engines
Lesson 4: Determining Visitor Behavior Patterns
Lesson 5: Examining Subsets of Traffic
Appendix A: Making Reports More Usable
Appendix B: Technical Details of Metric Accuracy
Links to Visit:
Google Analytics explained at Wikipedia.org
Firefox Plugins For Web Developers
Web Developer 1.1.6 Toolbar – Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools. Tools include window resizing, rulers, link and page validation, and link checking. This also allows you to view the external CSS file of a website. (Updated May 19, 2008) – Download
Firebug 1.2.0b4 – Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. Firebug 1.2 requires Firefox 3. Firefox 2 users should install the older 1.05 version of Firebug. (Updated Juhne 28, 2008) – Download
Page Validator 3.0.0 – Validates a page using the W3C Markup Validation Service. Adds an option to the right-click context menu and to the Tools menu to allow for easy validation of the current page. Opens the results in a new tab. This is a simple extension that will work only for online pages. Note: The W3C Markup Validation Service now allows you to validate behind a site secured with HTAccess by allowing you to login for it. (Updated June 28, 2008) – Download
Link Checker 0.6.3 – Check the validity of links on any webpage. (updated June 22, 2008) – Download
Now that you have submitted your blog to both Google and Yahoo and you have also placed tracking codes from Google Analytics, you are rest assured your site or blog will be crawled, indexed and visited regularly by these search engines.
For Web Developers and Programming Support, You Can Stop Now. Store your blog’s URL in a text file and name it as YourFirstName_blog.txt
For Site Admins and Webmasters, Please Go To The Next Page: Basic Link Building Methods
Go To Previous Page: Google Webmaster Verification Process
