I am addicted to checking my Google search engine rankings, otherwise known as SERP. Last week, when the listing for 100Eyes under “photo magazine,” that normally ranges from #30 to #11, disappeared entirely, I was practivcally in mourning.
My obsession with Google listings is admittedly irrational. No one really clicks through under “photo magazine” or “photography magazine” or even “professional photography magazine” anyway, but it was and is a great source of pride for me, that my little magazine could be listed ahead of so many other “heavyweights.”
I got a lot of response from the last blog on SEO, so I thought I would follow it up with some other tips on the topic.
Google has much information for webmasters, and I strongly suggest that you sign up for Google Webmaster tools, which is a free service. Webmaster tools takes you under the hood and shows you the searches that your site is found on, and what the position your site is shown at. Here are the search results for Frank Relle, a photographer that I featured a few months agothe listing comes up in the fourth of fifth position, which is pretty good!
In order for you to activate your account, you will need an FTP program, log-on to your site, and place a little bit of code that Google will give you in the “head” section of your homepage. In WordPress this is in your theme “header.php” file. Back on the Webmaster tools page you ask Google to verify that you own the page, and it will pull in the page and look for your code in the “head” section. Thats all there is too it!
Webmaster tools shows you when your site was last crawled, if there were pages that were not crawled, and if there were problems (404 errors) finding certain pages. You can also download a list of all the backlinks to you your site, that is all the links to your site out there on the World Wide Web. At last count 100Eyes had something like 5.000 backlinks, which is a nice number, and probably the reason for the high ranking in some searches.
Using webmaster tools you can start to get an understand of how the Google bots work, and especially if there are problems on your pages, for example a robots.txt file that might be instructing crawlers not to crawl certain pages. It also helps if you have an sitemap.xml file that gives the search engines a picture of what your site. If you are using WordPress, like I do, there is even a plug-in that will create this .xml file for you, and you can then use Webmaster tools to check and see if the Google bot has found it.
By the way, after Googing “SEO listing lost” I found some very good advice, which was to take a few days off, and the listing would rep-appear, and happily the listing for 100eyes.org re-appeared. So what Google taketh Google giveth back, at least this time.