As a small business owner, you have probably received myriad emails from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) outfits, offering to get you to the first page of Google. You may have also heard the collective groans from SEO insiders in response to that claim. At its core, Search Engine Optimization is just how web professionals describe a specific set of information that should be present in your website’s files. There is certainly more to it than that, but this minimum threshold is what we will talk about in this article. So what can do with your CrystalCommerce site to positively impact your SEO?
We’re all pretty much here to appease Google, right? Before you do that, you need to create the account that lets you talk to Google about your business website. The place to go to sign up for that account is Google Webmaster Tools. To sign in here, you’ll need a gmail account that you can associated with your business website.
Your new Google webmaster tools account exists, and your site exists. Now, you need to prove to Google that a connection between the two exists! This is called “verifying site ownership,” and once you do it the whole cornucopia of actions available via Google Webmaster Tools is unlocked. There are quite a few ways to verify ownership, and Google’s documentation on their “verify site ownership” knowledge base page is extremely helpful. Here is how they specifically relate to CrystalCommerce:
A sitemap is a tool that web crawlers use to read through the pages of your website more efficiently. If your website was a building, the sitemap would be the blueprint for that building. Crawlers can read through the pages of your site without a sitemap, so it’s not totally necessary to have one for your site. However, creating and submitting a sitemap through Google Webmaster Tools serves a second (arguably more important) purpose: indicating to Google that your site is ready to be indexed. Google constantly crawls the internet for updates and submitting a sitemap “jumps” your site up to the front of the line. After Google crawls your site, the Webmaster Tools interface allows you to see exactly how many pages and images have been submitted and indexed. It will also highlight any errors that you may be unaware of. There are three steps in this process:
sitemap.xml
. Download it, and send it to us in step 2!sitemap.xml
needs to be present in the top-level folder of your site in order for Google to use it. We still have exclusive access to that area of your site, so you will need to get in touch with us via the design queue in order to add that file to your site.http://yourwebsite.crystalcommerce.com/files/sitemap.xml
— don’t forget /files/
!
This is a huge and active research field, and new “best practices” emerge regularly. It’s important to remember though, SEO is just the collective body of “best guesses.” Nobody actually knows the exact formula that Google is looking for, and these few tips alone won’t get you to the top of Google. What they do instead is to get you a seat at the table, and to get you thinking about what you can do to influence your SEO all by yourself. These are things you can do for free, and (mostly) by yourself! Once you have these three sorted out, you can start digging deeper into what else you can do to help differentiate your business from your competition and see your page rank rise.
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