You$got$a$website … Igota Now$what? website! · The majority of the traffic to your website will come through a search engine. Need to know: •Best practicesso ensure your information

You got a website…

Now what?I got awebsite!

Adriana Kuehnel – Nov.2017

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.

According to eBiz (ebizmba.com – July/2017)the 6 most popular search engines are

Source: http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/search-‐engines

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.

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 APage B

Page APage D

Page 2Page BPage D

• 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

General guidelines to make your site “search engine friendly”

Best Practices

Tools









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









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.

For Google sites the description will be based on your content and search query:

A)

B)

C)









The structure of your website makes up the URL

<<domain-‐name>>/people/adriana

<<domain-‐name>>/people/adriana/

<<domain-‐name>>/people/adriana/publications/

<<domain-‐name>>/people/adriana/fieldtrips/hawaii/

Avoid ”empty” pages.<<domain-‐name>>/people/adriana/fieldtrips/

goes nowhere!!!

Create a natural flowing of hierarchy, that allows part of the URL be removed.

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 real-world name of the site instead of the domain name, and the URL structure of the sites in a breadcrumbs-like format.

before: after:









All images can have an "alt" attribute, which you should take advantage of.

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:

https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/ZSbwblVrKzlViXZ9R1VAxf7IbQjQUajV41LQX8IRdwK7Okvoe_uTO354lvMeMN_4OjsVMMvvbX_ibBJLINxOcykNmpkAWWic5IWQUh7hZaAI5DdBaP0=w673

It is highly recommended to use “alt” text on images when using Google sites!

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.









Submit your site to Google

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url

Submit your site to Bing

https://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url

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.









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!

Webmasters have a way to control what parts of a site should not be accessed by search engine crawlers.

We can enable or disable the setting:

”Request public search engines to not display my site”.

How to control crawling in Google Sites?









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.

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

Link Google Analytics to your Google Site >>

Google Analyticshttps://analytics.google.com

Reports on how website users interact with your site

First time users: If you already have an account:

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.

Google Analytics

Google Search Consolehttps://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Bing webmaster tools

https://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster

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…

Put some effort, and let those search engines work for you.

Thanks for watching!

Documents

You$got$a$website … Igota Now$what? website! · The majority of the traffic to your website will come through a search engine. Need to know: •Best practicesso ensure your information