Andrew,
Really enjoyed your insight and information about SEO. I did find a program that has allowed me to publish meta tags, keywords and descriptions for my website. Although I did get those entered on Sunday, I do not see Google recognizing them. How often will Google “search” sites for keywords and meta tags. Somehow, I thought it was sooner than this. Perhaps I did not optimize correctly, but when I use SEOmoz, it does have the titles, meta tags, and keywords all listed on each page of the website.
Any comments on these observations?
Lorin Fink
Andrew replies to question:
So, in answer to Lorin’s question, I would say:
Lorin: I did find a program that has allowed me to publish meta tags, keywords and descriptions for my website. Although I did get those entered on Sunday, I do not see Google recognizing them. How often will Google “search” sites for keywords and meta tags. Somehow, I thought it was sooner than this.
AK: Google will eventually pick up the changes, but it gives priority to websites that have a lot of content that changes frequently. Letting Google know that you’ve updated the website will help get the changes picked up sooner.
The best way to “let Google know” is to publish a sitemap file (a special XML-formatted file that only search engines use), and to register the sitemap with Google’s Webmaster Tools.
To begin, you need to first create the sitemap file. Some CMS and blog software (e.g. WordPress) automatically generate sitemaps for you. Or you can use a plugin like http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/ to do the work for you.
If you need to generate a sitemap manually, try the free service at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com. You just enter your website address and it takes care of the rest. Put the sitemap.xml file in the root directory of your website.
Next, set up an account at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools. You’ll need to verify that you’re the rightful owner of the website, and Google gives you three ways to do it. The easiest to put a blank html file that Google generates for you in the root of the website, then let Google verify that it’s there.
Once you’ve verified the website, you can “register” the sitemap file with Google. Google will immediately tell you if the sitemap’s OK, and within 12-48 hrs should show you whether it’s added the URLs to its index. If you see that the file’s been processed and there are no errors, then any changes you’ve made to the pages should show up in the search results immediately. (Webmaster Tools has a number of nifty features beyond sitemaps, and is an indispensable part of any SEO toolkit)
If you’re generating the sitemap manually, you’ll need to update it each time you add pages to the website. Google will periodically check your sitemap to see if it has changed, but you can also “force” it to update the sitemap through Webmaster Tools.
Yahoo and Bing have merged their search engines, and you can similarly manage your sitemaps using Bing’s webmaster tools. http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster/
Lorin: Perhaps I did not optimize correctly, but when I use SEOmoz, it does have the titles, meta tags, and keywords all listed on each page of the website.
AK: You are doing it right…you can and should use SEOMoz to check that everything is set up properly. The problem is Google hasn’t re-indexed your pages yet, and is still showing the old page data in the search results. Pushing your sitemap to Google will prompt it to come back and re-index your pages.
The reason there’s a delay in changes being picked up is that Google can’t keep track of every webpage on the internet in real time…it needs to periodically come back to each website in its index and check for new pages.
Google will, however, keep track of how often your site content changes, and will come back to check for changes more frequently if it finds new content each time it checks. Google almost continuously checks Amazon for new pages and updated content, so if you can keep updating your website even several times a week, you’ll see that changes are picked up quickly.