Stomping the Search Engines 2

Yesterday I finally received my copy of Stomping the Search Engines 2 (STSE2) via UPS, along with a copy of the Net Effect trade magazine. If you’ve already ordered your own copy of STSE2, you know that they try to upsell you on a few additional packages, and if you purchase all of the additional products you’ll spend over $400. If not, I want to make sure you know that. You also subscribe to the Net Effect magazine, so if you don’t want that, you’ll have to cancel it after your first order arrives.

Now I have to admit that I did purchase a couple of the extra packages. I opted to receive the StomperNet Insiders’ DVD of the Month that will accompany each issue of the Net Effect. I also ordered the Mega Pack, which is a collection of 4 or 5 modules covering additional topics such as Pay Per Click advertising. All said, I spent about an extra $100 on the upgrades.

So far I’ve watched the module 1 videos from the STSE2 disc, and while they were basic and introductory in nature (which is expected for module 1), the quality was excellent. I’m looking forward to watching the entire course.

My initial reaction to the Net Effect magazine wasn’t as positive. I quickly skimmed through it, read the first article, and thought that it wasn’t worth $30 a month. Later I decided to read through more of the articles, and they were all great. So while I’m still on the fence, I’m liking it more than I did at first glance, and have decided to remain subscribed through at least the second issue before making a final decision on it.

I haven’t had a chance to watch any of the extra videos from the Insiders’ DVD of the Month or the Mega Pack discs. When I do get a chance to watch those videos, I’ll post a note letting you know what I think of them.

If you have already started watching Stomping the Search Engines 2 or read the Net Effect (or watched any of the extra videos) then I’d love to know what you think of them! Please share your comments below…

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Google Myth Busters: You Will Not Be Penalized For Submitting Your Sitemap

When you read blog and forum posts about Google, you are sure to read a ton of myths. One of the most common myths I’ve read says that your site will be penalized if you submit your sitemap to Google. People honestly believe that if you setup a Google Webmaster Tools account and submit your sitemap to it, you will lose rankings… or it will take much longer to get ranked… or you’ll be inviting a manual review…

The myth is complete bunk. There is NO HARM in submitting your site to Google’s Webmaster Tools.

I mean come on… conspiracy theories are fine and all, but do you really think that Google has some sinister purpose for the Google Webmaster Tools? I can just picture it, some overworked Google engineer sleeping under the desk in his cubicle, muttering in his sleep: “Mwuhahaha… they setup their sites on Google Webmaster Tools and we crush them! Mwuhahaha…”

Myth: Debunked

Let’s debunk this myth with the overwhelming fact that Google WANTS to display the most relevant search results, so they can make more money!

It’s really simple:

1. Google displays the most relevant search results.
2. More and more people use Google for searching.
3. More people searching means more PPC ads being displayed.

So if you have a really great site full of relevant content, do you think Google is going to punish your site because you submitted your sitemap? I’m sorry, but that doesn’t make any sense to me.

Fact: What’s Really Happening

Here’s what I think is really happening that causes people to believe in this myth… people submit their sitemaps TOO SOON. When you read the Google Webmaster Guidelines, they are very specific when they use the phrase “when your site is ready.” Google doesn’t care about your site until it’s ready. What does that mean? Your site is ready when you have enough content to deserve to be ranked at Google.

So let’s say you’re building a site on blue widgets. Obviously you’re not going to rank #1 for blue widgets overnight, but does your site deserve to be listed anywhere in the search results for blue widgets? Does your site have at least a minimum level of design and content that’s completed, so if a visitor interested in blue widgets came to your site, they’d find something of value? If the answer to that question is yes, then you will have no troubles if you submit your site to the Google Webmaster Tools. If the answer is no, then you shouldn’t even allow your site to get indexed by Google, because it’s not ready yet.

Conclusion

There’s no harm in submitting a good site to Google’s Webmaster Tools.

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Is Google Keyword Tool’s Data Insufficient?

I was trying to do some keyword research last night, and noticed some strange behavior from the Google Keyword Tool. The tool would work for awhile, then suddenly all keywords would return INSUFFICIENT DATA for all of the fields. I’m talking all keywords, even ones that we know have data like “hdtv” and “ipod.” It did this whether I was using the tool anonymously or logged into my Adwords account.

I chalked it up to temporary problems and moved on to other tasks.

Tonight I tried to resume my keyword research. Everything was working fine at first, then the Google Keyword Tool began displaying INSUFFICIENT DATA for all of the keywords again. I was using FireFox for my research, so I jumped over to Internet Explorer to try it there. It worked for a little bit, and then started to have the same problem.

I jumped back over to FireFox and cleared both my cache and my cookies. I closed and relaunched the browser, and the tool started working for awhile. Eventually it started failing again.

Wondering if it was just me, I performed a Google Blog search for “insufficient data google keyword tool” and discovered that other people have been experiencing the same problem for a few days now.

So if you are having similar problems with the Google Keyword Tool, please know that you’re not alone. You can try changing to a new browser or clearing your cookies/cache, as that temporarily fixed the problem for me. But I can’t get it to work consistently throughout the evening. Let’s hope Google fixes this issue soon!

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Content vs. No Content

Today I got into a debate on the BANS forum regarding the best strategy for deploying BANS sites. Basically, the debate centered around two schools of thought:

1. Build as many BANS sites as possible, as quickly as possible. Don’t worry about content or quality. The more the better.
2. Build each BANS site with a focus on quality. Add unique content. Ensure your site adds value to the visitors.

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Writing Ads for USFreeads

If you have an account with USFreeAds, or have been considering getting one, you’ll want to check out Rochelle’s instructions for writing ads for USFreeAds. They’re slightly focused on BANS and the eBay affiliate program, but you can easily adapt the instructions for any type of ad.

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More ideas for Inbound Links

I previously talked about how to get inbound links to your site. Here are some additional ideas for getting inbound links to your site:

• Yahoo Answers
  Create a Yahoo Answers account and answer questions relating to your site’s niche. Try to answer around 5 questions every day with

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Getting Inbound Links to your Site

Mark from the Build a Niche Store Empire series recently posted about getting inbound links to your site, otherwise known as backlinks. In the post, Mark lists some excellent, high quality ways to get inbound links (which the search engines love). Here are a few more ideas that I’d like to add to the list:

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Free Directory Submission with digiXMAS

I was browsing the Digital Point Forums earlier today and discovered a post about digiXMAS. This is a free software tool that allows you to submit your web sites to 150 directories. It uses an auto-submission process, so for each site you pick a category and enter in the CAPTCHA, and that’s it. After a few entries it starts to remember which categories apply to your site, so it will begin to automatically select them for you. So for most of the directories, all you have to do is type in the CAPTCHA if one exists, and click okay.

Pretty easy, and boom, your site is now listed with 150 directories. Those are free one-way backlinks to your site. Very nice!

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Submit Your Site to Search Engines

I’m going to start a new series titled “Build a Niche Store Checklist.” Basically it will be a series of posts that lists the steps I take when building a new Build a Niche Store web site. My first entry in the series is a step I just performed 5 minutes ago for my most recent BANS site: submitting the site to the search engines.

(Note: I’m going to focus on BANS sites in this post, but you can perform these same steps for any of your web sites.)

Each of the three main search engines–Google, Yahoo, and Windows Live Search–have webmaster portals where you can tell the search engine about your web site, authenticate it so that they know it’s really your site, submit your sitemap.xml file, and more.

I’m getting ahead of myself though. There’s a few steps you need to take before you start working with the search engines.

First things first… make sure your site is finished before you proceed with these steps. Now I didn’t say make sure your site was perfect, rather just make sure it’s finished. What I mean by that is make sure your site is finished to the point where you are ready for visitors to come and start buying stuff. Obviously no site is perfect, and undoubtedly you’ll change and improve things over time, but you will want your site functional before asking the search engines to start indexing it. The most important part of this is to make sure you don’t have any unfinished or broken pages, and that you don’t plan on making any major changes to your site’s navigation structure anytime soon.

On my very first BANS web site, I changed the home page from “home” to the title of my niche. This changed every link on my site from www.domain.com/home/subpage to www.domain.com/niche/subpage. Months later Google still hasn’t fixed all of the links to show the new path. I’m not trying to tell you that you can’t make such a change on your site if it’s needed… just that if you have plans to do a change like that anytime soon, make your changes first, then work with the search engines.

Alright, now that we have that out of the way, here’s the process I follow to submit my BANS sites to the search engines. I’m going to stick with the 1, 2, 3 step approach, so hopefully that works for everyone to follow along easily.

1. Create a SITEMAP.XML file.
   A sitemap.xml file is an industry standard file you upload to the root of your web site. It helps search engines discover all of the pages on your web site. I use a free program called Vigos Gsitemap to generate my sitemap.xml files. This is a Windows program, so Mac users will have to find an alternative. (If you know of a good Mac alternative let me know and I’ll link it here.)I won’t get into the specifics of how to use Gsitemap, but basically it will spider your BANS site. Once that process is complete, you can tell it to generate a sitemap file, and then save that file to your desktop. Once the sitemap.xml file is saved to your desktop, I upload it to the root of my web site using Filezilla.
    
2. Create a ROBOTS.TXT file.
   This is another industry standard file that you also upload to the root of your web site. Making this file is really easy. Just open up your favorite text editor (on Windows I use Notepad). Inside the text file add the following text:

   User-agent: *
   Sitemap: http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml

   Obviously change the sitemap path to be the URL for your web site. When you’re done, save the file with the filename “robots.txt” and upload it to the root of your web site.

   Having a robots.txt file does the following three things:

   a) all search engines automatically look for one, so having it will eliminate a bunch of 404 errors in your web stats;
   b) the User-agent: * line invites any and all search engine spiders to index your site;
   c) the Sitemap: http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml line (modified for your web site URL) tells all of the search engines where to find your sitemap.xml file.

   There’s a lot more you can do with a robots.txt file, but that’s pretty much all I use it for with my BANS sites. Actually, once you’ve done those two steps you could call it good and move on, because every search engine that finds your site will look for the robots.txt file, find that it’s welcome to index everything on the site, and be shown where to find your sitemap.xml file to aid it in discovering all of your site’s pages. I like to take it a step further however…
    

3. Authenticate your site with Google.
   Go to Google Webmaster Tools and click “Get Started” to login with your Google account. Once you log in, you’ll be at the dashboard where you can enter your site’s URL and click “Add Site.” Now Google will want you to authenticate your site. I always use the Meta Tag verification method. Simply copy the meta tag they provide. Next open up a new browser window, log into your BANS site’s admin page and go to the the templates area, and paste the meta tag you copied from Google into the header.php right below these existing tags:

   <?=$front->meta();?>
   <meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″ />

   Once you have Google’s meta tag pasted into header.php, click save and go back over to the browser window  you still have open for Google’s webmaster tools site. Click the button to verify. If everything worked, Google will now recognize that you have verified the site.

   Next click the “Sitemaps” button on the left and add a “General Web Sitemap.” It defaults to your main site URL, so just add in the name of your sitemap file (most likely “sitemap.xml”).

   Finally, click on the “Tools” button on the left, and then click on the “Set preferred domain” link. This tells Google your preference on whether or not to display “www” in their index. I prefer to have Google always display the “www” for the majority of my sites. Don’t forget to click the “Ok” button to save your choice. Now you’re finished with Google.
    

4. Authenticate your site with Yahoo.
   Authenticating your site with Yahoo is very similar to authenticating with Google. Go to Yahoo Site Explorer and use the link in the top left of the page to login with your Yahoo account. Once you’re logged in, just like with Google, you enter your site’s URL and click the “Add My Site” button. After you add your site it shows up in the main list.Next click on the “Authenticate” button on the right site of your site’s listing. Again I prefer using the Meta Tag verification method, so I copy the meta tag that’s displayed and paste it into my site’s header.php below the Google meta tag I already added. After I save my header.php file, I go back to Yahoo and click “Ready to Authenticate.”

   Yahoo does not authenticate sites immediately like Google does, but that’s okay, you can still submit your sitemap.xml file in the meantime. Click on the “Manage” button next to your site. Just like at Google, enter in the name of your sitemap file, keeping the default type as “Web Site Feed,” and click the “Add Feed” button. This submits your sitemap file to Yahoo. Now you’re done with both Google and Yahoo.
    

5. Authenticate your site with Windows Live Search (MSN).
   Not as many people bother authenticating with Windows Live, but I like to do this because… well… why not? Anything I can do to help my site with the search engines is a good thing in my book, and Windows Live is the third most popular search engine.Go to Live Search Webmaster Center and click the “Sign in to use the tools” button to login with your Windows Live ID. Next click the “Add a Site” button. Next enter in the URL of your web site and the full URL of your sitemap.xml file. So for example you’d enter http://www.domain.com/ for the web site address, and http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml for the sitemap address. Don’t worry because if you type in either path incorrectly, it will warn you when you try to submit. As always, I choose the Meta Tag verification method. You need to enter in a valid e-mail address, and signing up for the newsletter is up to you. Go ahead and click “Submit.”

   Next you’ll copy the meta tag and paste it into your site’s header.php file below the Google and Yahoo meta tags. After you copy it to your header.php and save, go back to Live Search Webmaster Center and click the “OK” button to finish adding your site. Now you’re finished with Windows Live Search.

 
Now You’re Finished!
Let’s recap everything you just did…

…you generated a sitemap.xml file and uploaded it to the root of your site. This file helps all search engines know where to find all the pages on your site.

…you created a robots.txt file and uploaded it to the root of your site. This file invites all search engines to index all of the pages on your site. It also tells them where to find your sitemap.xml file.

…you submitted and authenticated your site with Google. Now Google knows about your site and your sitemap file. It also knows whether or not you prefer “www” for your site address. You can go back to Google from time to time and check for errors, see how many pages on your site Google has indexed, etc.

…you submitted and authenticated your site with Yahoo. Now Yahoo knows about your site and your sitemap file. You can check back with Yahoo from time to time as it’s a great place to see what other sites on the web are linking back to your site.

…you submitted and authenticated your site with Windows Live Search. Now Live Search knows about your site and your sitemap file. You can check back with Live Search from time to time to see how well your site is ranking in their search engine.

This may seem like a lot of work, but once you’ve done it a few times, it gets easier. I just followed these steps for my most recent BANS site, and the whole process took less than 10 minutes from start to finish. So this procedure is an easy and quick way to jump start your BANS site–or any of your web sites for that matter–with the search engines.

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Article: How to Choose the Right Keywords

I wrote an article over at Hubpages titled “How to Choose the Right Keywords.” I originally posted about this method at the BANS user forum, and after getting several compliments on my post, I decided to write it up as an article to share with everybody, as the method works well for anyone looking to optimize their website with keywords.

As a bonus, I created my very first YouTube video to go along with the article! Basically the video demonstrates me going through the step by step process of finding some keywords using the free method. I realize the quality isn’t the best on the video, but it should be good enough to drive home how simple the process really is.

If you get a chance to read the article or watch the video, please drop me a line and let me know what you thought of it. I’m hoping to do more articles and videos in the future, so any feedback you can give me is appreciated!

(PS. If you didn’t already realize, writing an article and producing a video are methods discussed in StomperNet’s Social Marketing Guide. Hint, hint…)

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