Appeasing Google

Today I ensured that SendTool plays well with Google. For a small site, its relatively quick and painless. Most everything I needed was available through http://google.com/webmasters/.

First things first, for a new site, I needed to submit my URL to Google so the next time the googlebot makes its rounds SendTool gets indexed. I could wait for the googlebot to find it, but why wait.

After submitting your site, its a good idea to let Google know which pages are most important. Its time to create a sitemap. Sitemaps are XML files that help the googlebot to more efficiently index your site. There are only a handful of tags to learn, you can use mine as a example if you’d like. Read more about creating sitemaps at Google.

In addition to a sitemap, you’ll probably also want to add a robots.txt file. The robots file tells the bots what and what not to index. And if they are well behaved bots they’ll adhere to your rules. In my case it doesn’t make sense for any bot to index the download page or the upload summary page. You can see in my robots.txt file that I’ve disabled indexing for those pages. You can read more about robots.txt syntax at robotstxt.org.

The last thing I did was ensure that my XHTML and CSS were valid.  W3C makes this a single click experience.  Follow these links for HTML/XHTML Validation and CSS Validation.

What I’ve done is just a start, I’ll be sure to outline more ways to optimize for search as I implement them.   Thats all for today.