philduba.com

Web Tools in General
- www.yourdomain.com and domain.com are seen as two different sites
- Allow for seeing what Google sees while it tries to index your site
- Overview screen shows the errors of the web crawl, first step in getting indexed is to fix errors
- Sitemap file goes in the root of site, robots.txt defines the sitemap

Web Crawl screen
- details on each of the web crawler errors
- should go through each and try to fix where applicable
- having analytics and/or adSense helps in fixing some errors
- Google wants meta data that is unique per page
- want meta descriptions
- Looks for Title tags, doesn't like duplicates, the more standardization between title tags and say the page title in a heading, the more Google likey. Also, too short or two long is bad as well as non-informative title tags. Google loves questions as titles. Most indexed page on FA is "What is ColdFusion?"


Statistics
- Spend most of the time here
- Going to download, store, write code to analyze, etc.
- Shows what is searched and top clicked searches. Nice to compare each
- No webmaster API so must go to site to get the information (Pavlov's dog as Michael likes to say)
- A correlation between buying AdWords and AdSense income, suggest to actually to do this
- Standardize content on case sensitivity as it is different
- keywords - spaces get thrown out. Use keywords to see what Google considers your site
- Google determines what is "News" and tries to label and provide statistics as much

Links
- Can see how users link to the site and the popularity of a particular page
- Good to look at the internal links when changing page URLs
- sitelinks - what is shown if show up as first link in Google, happen to see what Google thinks is appointment and can change

Sitemaps
- Can create sitemaps for various areas of the site (news, articles, etc.)
- If going to group and make sitemaps smaller, make related content grouped
- generice sitemap.xml the standard pages (index.cfm, about.cfm, etc.)
- Make sure that it is announced using CFHTTP request to a URL or resubmitting using the tools (particularly good for blogs as Google may index only once a week)
- Total URLs vs. Indexed URLs - try to get as close as possible

Other Hints
- Whatever dynamic content is to be displayed should have a corresponding static content (AJAX/Flash based) like a map of the U.S. using drill down. Loses context as a result. Double work but sometimes it is needed to maintain context and indexing.