PharmiMike

This may seem obvious, and also more of an SEO point, but as I’ve just spent some time doing it myself, I thought I’d remind you!.

Google et al, rely heavily on sitemap.xml to know what’s on your site. Sure they can crawl and do crawl it, but why make their lives hard. By keeping a valid sitemap.xml file in the root of your site, you provide a link to all the pages on your site that the search engines should know about.  A few points:

• you should update your sitemaps every time you change content. (ie add a new job) so it should be done dynamically without you  having to get involved
• you can have multiple sitemaps. Useful if like on www.PharmiWeb.com, you have thousands of pages.
• you can add your sitemap(s) url to your robots.txt file (another essential) to help the engines keep track
• submit your sitemaps to google webmaster tools and bing
• Yahoo treat things differently, I’ll do that separately!

One aspect of Bing that seems to have been overlooked by many is the RSS (yes I’m still obsessed). You can create an RSS feed for ANY search, simply by putting “&format=RSS” on the end of the search string. Thats pretty damn powerful.

So if you want to keep tabs on a particular topic then you can run a query and create an RSS for your feedreader. You can so a similar thing too with GoogleAlerts too.

Lets assume for example I want to keep track of “Pfizer”.

http://www.bing.com:80/news/search?q=pfizer&go=&form=QBNR&format=rss 

Simple. You can of course also use that as a news feed on your site. You do of course get a lot of rubbish returned, but hey, its free.

If you want to submit your site to BING, there are a few steps to go through.

How to Submit to site to Bing

1. Go to this URL if you want to submit your website to Bing. You will need to sign in with your Windows Live ID to access the webmaster center.

2. Enter the website URL and also sitemap URL (Good idea to have one!).

3. Next step is to verify your website and this can be done either with XML verification or HTML meta tag verification. You can get more details from the help center.

4. Once your website is validated, you will see details like number of URLs indexed, any issues etc.

Bing also has a tool for AdCentre keyword Suggestions, but it crashed when I tried to install it. so I’ll try again later.

You will also need to do a similar thing with Google and Yahoo.