Having risen even higher up the Google rankings for Bristol SEO (currently showing at number two) I checked my rankings out on Yahoo! and Live.com. It turns out that as anticipated I am nowhere. One of the first things I did back in August was to submit my site to Google Webmaster Tools, but I didn’t submit to Yahoo! Site Explorer, Live.com Webmaster Center or Ask.com. As there are no links to my site, this means that none of these search engines will know about me.
It seems apparent from my Google success that having links into your site with keyword rich anchor text is less of an important factor than most people would have you believe, and that in fact submitting your site using webmaster tools and having good internal links and metadata is a far more important than I had initially thought.
I have used Arne Brachold’s sitemap generator for WordPress plugin to create a sitemap for my site that will update every time a new post is created. It’s got a great configuration setup, and you can choose the priority of different types of post, exclude posts and more. It will also generate a robots.txt file for you, telling search engines where your sitemap.xml file is.
So I have now submitted my site to Yahoo!, Live.com and Ask.com – ask is an interesting one to submit your site to, rather than having a webmaster tools section you simply go to http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A// and add the URL of your sitemap, so in my case: http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//jamesmorell.com/sitemap.xml and your sitemap is submitted to them. With Yahoo! and Live you need to register with them, get a meta tag and add it to your site.
Adding my site to these services should see me increase in the rankings in these search engines, and hopefully reflect the success I have seen in Google. It will be interesting to see if it takes three months or so to rank in Yahoo! Live and Ask, or if it’s faster. I’ll keep an eye out and update as required.
Tags: Bristol, google, SEO, sitemap generator, Sitemaps, webmaster tools, Wordpress, yahoo
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