XSitePro is, without a doubt, the best tool for rapid web site creation I have ever used. With its in built search engine optimisation tools you are pretty certain that, if you follow the advice you are given, the pages you have created are equipped to do well on the search engines.
Before that though, you have to get your pages indexed by the search engines. This is actually pretty easy but you have to put in a little effort.
The Right Way to Launch Your XSitePro Site was originally written as a forum reply to someone who asked me how I got my pages indexed so quickly.
The answer is primarily through blogging and pinging, and by creating RSS feeds.
Confused?
No need - read on. The concepts and background are explained.
Blogging - the background
A web log (blog) is really a very simple web site. Blogs started out as a way for people to get their thoughts out onto the internet quickly with no editing and with no need for html or technical skills of any sort.
Yahoo cottoned on to blogs pretty early and started to automatically index any blog linked to from pages already in the directory. The in crowd pretty rapidly noticed that Yahoo also very quickly spidered and indexed any blogs posted to your yahoo personal home page (MyYahoo). The frequency of visit and depth of indexing seemed to relate to the frequency of post. I guess the idea was to reward those bloggers who worked hardest and had something to say.
Not surprisingly, an industry developed around automating the process of blogging. e-books that contained little more information than
- 'create a blog,
- open a my yahoo account,
- register your blog with other specialist directories,
- ping (simple means tell them) the directories after each post
- and post frequently'
were selling for $97.
Sounds a lot but it does cost you $200 to have your site considered for entry in the Yahoo directory normally.
Not only did this get your site included, it did so very quickly (often less than 24 hours) and the same technique could be used over and over so you could get all your sites indexed quickly.
To speed up the process still further automated posting tools were developed. These would scrape content from your site (and frequently from other sites) and post automatically to your blog to a pre-defined schedule.
The personal touch was gone. Effectively these tools were spamming the search engines. The effectiveness of blog and ping began to decline.
Blog and Ping - Now
Blog and Ping still works - but it takes a little longer.
Hence, for every web site you create you should also create a blog. The easiest way is to visit www.blogger.com and follow the instructions. Your blog can be up and running in less than 2 minutes.
Wordpress provides a very popular and powerful alternative. If your web hosting company provides access to fantastico you can install Wordpress on your host for free.
With your blog set up you now need to seed it with 4 or 5 articles to provide some base content. Now register your blog on your MyYahoo home page. MSN and Google also have personal home pages so register your blogs there too.
Over the next week make sure you post one new article a day. As I tend to build content sites (not always) the blog posts are pretty much copies of my web pages and it is little extra effort to post to the blog.
Thereafter you should post at least once a week (I'm failing miserably at the moment) to keep the blog fresh. Stick with it and your site will get indexed on Yahoo (it currently seems to take about 10 to 20 days though other people still report getting indexed in 48 hours or less - you need to experiment with the amount of initial content and the frequency of subsequent posting).
RSS - Really Simple Syndication
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a technology for you to be able to make the content of your site (or selections of the content) available to other web masters to use on their site in 'news feeds'. You can, of course, also choose to use other peoples RSS feeds on your sites.
By posting your RSS feed to MyYahoo, Google and MyMSN you used to guarantee that your site would rapidly get spidered. Your feed updates every time you update your site and the search engines get pinged as with blogs. In the past this quickly brought the spiders to index your site.
Here's and example of an RSS feed: http://www.thedigitalswitchover.co.uk/SatelliteNews.php
The advantage of placing a RSS feed on your site is that every time the feed is updated, so is your site. The search engines seem to love sites with regularly updated content. It is a win-win equation. By using RSS aggregators you can place many feeds on your site. Hence, to the search engines love you even more and increase your ranking and position.
Just as with blogging, many automated tools are available for RSS. Once again, some do little more than spam the search engines with pages and pages of duplicate content (the search engines apparently hate duplicate content and have been known to delist sites). Other tools do a better job.
RSS still works. Used properly it really enhances a site. It certainly does give a boost to index and spider times (in my experience). Each time I post a RSS feed I get a short term boost in traffic.
For me blog and ping still makes sense. I am also adding RSS to all my sites as I find the time.
Where I have used both on my sites I have always been indexed by the 3 big search engines in 10 days or less.
Getting Ranked in the Search Engines
Blog and ping, and RSS feeds certainly help to get your pages indexed more quickly. There are many other techniques you can use. One of the best is to get a one way, inbound link from a site with a good page rank (PR5 or greater).
Getting indexed is only the start. To start getting search engine traffic it is essential to bet high rankings too.
Even for a relatively low demand keyword such as XSitePro Google currently has over 50,000 sites listed. High demand terms can easily have 20,000,000 competing site listed.
How to achieve high search engine rankings is a huge leap away from simply getting indexed.
