Google have updated the Sitemaps Site Configuration section of their webmasters tools service.
Although its a minor change I really like the new style, its a lot easier to visualise everything. Hopefully Google will start updating more of the config options in Webmasters Tools. Bringing up to Googles current style guidelines would give it a well needed revamp!
I recently polled a small and friendly group of Digital Marketers on their favorite office based software for a Mac’s. The reason for me doing this is that I have been struggling to find something that will actually work for me!
The options were:
I haven’t included all the options as it would just get a little bit silly as there is a tonne of them out there.
The results were a little surprising and also a little frustrating!
Use a Windows based machine received 10 votes witch means this option came in second. Many of the voters where Mac users or individuals that use both systems.
I personally thought that Open Office would come much higher up on the list, my personal experience with Microsoft Office for Mac (which got the most votes) has been very poor at best. MS Office on a windows machine is 1000% times better but switch is just too inconvenient.
For the record I am a huge fan of Windows 7, I think its fantastic and my personal computer is a Windows 7 machine. My work computer however is a Mac, it does everything I need it to do and it does it brilliantly. I do have Office 2007 on my Windows machine (which is fantastic btw) but carrying two computers around would become a drag!
If you want to add to this poll please do so below:
There is a new search engine on the block, well more specifically a P2P (peer to peer) search engine.
YaCy is a free search engine that anyone can use to build a search portal for their intranet or to help search the public internet. When contributing to the world-wide peer network, the scale of YaCy is limited only by the number of using it throughout the world.
It has the potential to index billions of web pages and is fully decentralized which means all users of the search engine network are equal, the network does not store user search requests and it is not possible for anyone to censor the content of the shared index.
YaCy state that they want to achieve freedom of information through a free, distributed web search which is powered by the world’s users.
The first port of call for people wanting to use the Yacy Search Engine is the YaCy website. From here you would need to download the YaCy client and can start performing searches.
Today They had a message up on the search portal portion of the website which stated that due to press releases the site is running incredibly slow. Even now four hours after my first attempt to search I still receive a server error.
I have also downloaded the Mac version of the YaCy client and it runs but very slow, i’m all for freeware and I think this idea is fantastic but it does seem to struggle at the moment. This may be due to the excessive load due to the press releases that have gone out today but I think various sites claims that this is a Google, Bing or Yahoo rival is far fetched.
I will say that you can see some real cool stuff from the Admin panel which, when you have installed the YaCy client, can be found at http://localhost:8090/ConfigBasic.html. The program runs from http://localhost:8090/. Apparently I am currently creating my own index of websites which will allow other people to find the websites that I have sorted! Cooool
I will continue to use this periodically and will be following it with interest so watch this space!
Google News Sitemaps are specifically designed to allow you to control what news is submitted to Google. More specifically they allow Google to:
Additionally Google states that you should only include news articles that are less than two days old (48 hours), this ensures that the content is fresh. A Google News Sitemap can contain no more that 1,000 urls, to add more you can utilise a sitemap_index file (which I have previously described how to create: The how to guide for Sitemap Index XML Files).
Included below is an example of a Google News Sitemap structure which includes some of the unique tags that can be applied:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:news="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.org/business/article55.html</loc>
<news:news>
<news:publication>
<news:name>Sam Osborne SEO</news:name>
<news:language>en</news:language>
</news:publication>
<news:access>Registration</news:access>
<news:genres>UserGenerated, Opinion</news:genres>
<news:publication_date>2011-11-26</news:publication_date>
<news:title>How to Create a Google News Sitemap</news:title>
<news:keywords>google news, sitemaps, xml</news:keywords>
<news:stock_tickers>IAMASTOCK, SEOSTOCK</news:stock_tickers>
</news:news>
</url>
</urlset>
Each of these tags has specific requirements and not all of them are needed, for example:
The publication tag requires a name and a location tag as children, For example, if the name appears in Google News as “Sam Osborne SEO (registration)”, you should use the name, “Sam Osborne SEO”. The language tag is pretty simple, its the language of your publication in short format, en for english, fi for finnish and it for italian as so on. This tag is required.
The access tag describes the accessibility of the article, if the article is accessible to Google News readers without a registration or subscription, this tag should be left out.
The genre tag is a comma-separated list of properties defining the content of the article, such as “Opinion” or “UserGenerated.” See Google News content properties for a list of possible values.
The publication_date tag displays the date the article was published. Google will accept any of the formats below:
The article title tag should only include the title of the article as it appears on your site, try not to duplicate any information such as the author, the date the article was published. This is something that is recommended to include but is not required.
The geo_locations tag is added to help Google identify the geographic location of your articles. This can be great to use if you have sections of your site that cater to different locations around the world. Again this is not required but is generally recommended.
The keyword tag can be used to specify relevant keywords for the article, there is no limit but its generally recommended to keep the individual word count to less that 10 as not to appear spammy in the Google News algorithm.
The last tag that can be added is the stock_ticker. So if you had written an article about Admiral Car Insurance and wanted to include the Stock Ticker for them you would include “LON:ADM”.
In my next installation of XML Sitemap guides I will be writing about how to include images within a Google News Sitemap. This will hopefully be shorter that this post!
There are many elements that make up part of the Google Ranking Algorithm, some more obvious than others. For me the title tag is a great place to start, it should be relevant to the page content and written for the user. Over optimising this tag or diluting it with too many keywords may mean that the page you are writing it for simply targets too many items.
Lets assume that the web page that you are writing the title tag for is targeting “SEO services London”. Firstly we should research the term and identify suitable key phrases to use, this can be done multiple ways but my first port of call would be the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.
Firstly ensure that you are researching keywords within the correct region, this can be selected in the drop down list shown below:
Search for “SEO services London” and you will be presented with a list of key phrase ideas. I would also suggest selecting Exact Match on the left hand side, this provides a much more accurate estimate of the search volumes within the selected region.
Now we have a list you need to select the ones you want for that selected web page, what we are looking to achieve is something along the lines of:
SEO Services London | Search Engine Optimisation Consultant London
Due to the length of the primary and secondary key phrases it was not suitable to include the brand name in this example. It could be added but it would make Google display a parenthesis (…) on the end and the above title tag may end up looking like the following:
SEO Services London | Search Engine Optimisation Consultant Lon …
Google will display anything up to approximately 70 characters but its good practice to keep it slightly shorter, I tend to aim for around 67, this allows for a little variation and plurals to be added as title tags should still be written for the user. Trying to include too many keywords will end up diluting the value of the title tag.
The main terms SEO services London has been included first as to increase specific relevance for the title tag. There has also been studies that have shown that including keywords towards the beginning of the title tag provides slightly higher authority in regards to the ranking factors.
It is also common practice to include the brand name at the end of the title tag, in some cases the brand name is just not appropriate to use within the 70 characters, instead the main key phrases are used but kept relatively short, up to 55 – 60 characters, the brand name can then be added to the end.