One of the more important actions that we can undertake as Webmasters (and Webmistresses) is to manage our sites via the tools offered to us by the major search engines, using the following links

• Google Webmaster tool
• Yahoo Site Explorer
• Bing Webmaster central

At each of these sites we can upload our sitemap.xml files  and can perform a myriad of other webmaster management functions. If you are not yet using these tools – click on these links and set up accounts for your sites.

Bing webmaster central, google webmaster, Yahoo site explorer Hide

Once we have created the all important sitemap.xml file,  we must inform the search engine crawlers of its location and there are several methods of doing his:

1. send an HTTP request
2. upload the sitemap.xml file directly to the search engines
3. add the location of the sitemap in your robots.txt file

In this blog entry I will only address # 3. While I do upload my sitemap.xml files to the major search engines, I also add the location of the sitemap file to the robots.txt file because all crawlers that look at the  robots.txt file wil be directed to my sitemaps and not just the search engines where I manually uploaded the site map. The following is the actual robots.txt file from http://webdesign-ri.com

User-agent: *
Sitemap: http://webdesign-ri.com/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://webdesign-ri.com/sitemap.htm
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /case_studies/

In the second line I have provided the path for the sitemap.xml file and in the 3rd line I have added a path to the sitemap.htm file.

robots.txt, sitemap.xml Hide

Key word density is simply the relationship between the frequency of the usage of keywords and key phrases and the total word count.

Mathematically,  it can be expressed as  (The number of word/phrase repeats * the number of words in  the phrase  / total number of words on each page) * 100

What value does it have from an SEO perspective? Well, search engines have a desired keyword density of  3% to 5%. Anything over 5% may be frowned upon as ‘keyword stuffing’ and anything less than 3% is an indicator that your keywords do not have enough frequency.

How do you measure keyword density? I use the Firefox plugin for SEOQuake and what I particular like about this tool is the ability to import key words and phrases from Google allowing the key words to be modeled.  The way to use the information is to adjust your most important key words/phrases to fall in the 3% to 5% range – it is pretty impossible to do this for all of your keywords and have text which is readable for human beings.

keyword density Hide

The following are ‘landmines’ which should be avoided, like the plague, if you wish you web site to perform well during organic searches.

Do not use

• hidden text or hidden links
• cloaking redirects
• automated queries
• keyword stuffing  with totally irrelevant keywords
• duplicate content on pages, domains or sub-domains
• (and this is obvious) undertake malicious behaviour such as phishing, viruses etc

SEO Hide