After posting my Geo Sitemap tutorial, I have had a difficult time getting my own Geo Sitemap, and my clients’ Geo Sitemaps to validate in Google Webmaster Tools.

If you add your Geo Sitemap to your general XML sitemap, it isn’t going to validate in Google Webmaster Tools, you’ll get this error:

“Status: Invalid XML tag,” as well as this line: “This tag was not recognized. Please fix it and resubmit.” followed by a reference to the line on the file containing the <geo> tag.

Apparently, even if you include Google’s geo namespace, their XML parser isn’t smart enough to figure out that the sitemap is referencing both regular web page, and a Geo Sitemap (KML file). Instead, Google recommends using a separate sitemap for every type of content that you have on your website (regular sitemap, Video Sitemap, Geo Sitemap, etc.). Here is an excerpt from an interesting discussion in Google Groups:

“One thing I would recommend is that you spit your URLs into separate Sitemap files based on the kind of content they’re pointing to. In other words, make a single Sitemap file just for your geo-content, and a different Sitemap file for (X)HTML / web-search based content. That makes it easier for us to recognize the kind of content that you’re pointing to.” 

The Solution

Here is the simplest solution:

• Create a Sitemap Index. Learn more about Sitemap Index files - basically a Sitemap Index file is used to list every sitemap on your website (for example, I have a sitemap in my root folder, and one in my blog directory that is generated automatically via a Wordpress plugin. Both are referenced in my Sitemap Index file.) Include links to each sitemap you plan to implement.
• Create a sitemap for each type of content on your website that you want search engines to index. I created sitemap.xml for my web pages, and geo-sitemap.xml for my KML Geo Sitemap.
• Submit all three to Google Webmaster Tools, and this time they will all validate.

From the sound of the Google Groups discussion, Webmaster Tools should eventually be smart enough to contain references to both kinds of content (which would make sense, considering Google’s official documentation says nothing about separating the two). For now though, it looks like we have to separate sitemaps based on content.

You want to make your website as informative as possible, right? For search engines, users – everybody. Help search engines, disabled (blind) users, and any users who may not understand the meaning of your acronym or abbreviation by using semantic XHTML tags like the <acronym>, <abbr>, and <address> tags in context.

If your website, for example, is about Medical Transcriptions, but you refer to them on the website only using the medical jargon MT, search engines and users looking at small snippets of text may confuse the acronym “MT” for Media Temple (MT), or the abbreviation for Montana (MT), so use the <acronym> tag to specify what you are referring to. The more specific you can be, the more likely you are to rank for those relevant terms, and as a result, your users content to be more informative and useful.

To see it in action, hover your mouse over this: XHTML. You’ll see a tool tip with the written-out version: Extensible HyperText Markup Language. If users or search engines don’t already know what the acronym stands for, then the title attribute (see below) will inform them, and text-to-speech engines will be able to see that the full term that the acronym represents as well. 

Finally, using the <address> tag is getting increased attention lately, especially for local businesses and websites that users would search for with Google Local Search, Maps, YellowPages.com, Yelp.com, etc. The <address> tag helps to isolate the address from the rest of the copy on your website, making your website more relevant to local or geo targeted search queries, such as “san diego pizza” or “pizza 94023″ (searching by zip code).

Code Examples

How to use the  <acronym> tag:

1. <acronym title="National Aeronautics and Space Administration">NASA</acronym>
2. <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">SEO</acronym>
3. <acronym title="Medical Transcription">MT</acronym>

How to use the <abbr> tag:

1. <abbr title="Utah">UT</abbr>
2. <abbr title="Corporation">Corp</abbr>.

How to use the <address> tag:

1. <address>
2. Address:14 East Anywhere Drive<br />
3. City, <abbr title="State">ST</state> 55555
4. </acronym>

When it comes to distinguising between acronyms, initialisms, and abbreviations, the following guides are very useful. When it comes to implementing the <acronym> and <abbr> tags, the W3C appears to suggest that <acronym> should be used for acronyms and initialisms, and <abbr> is used for abbreviated and shortened words (Inc., Gov., etc.).

• The W3C guide for Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Grammar Girl Abbreviations, Acronyms, and Initialisms
• This article sorts out the confusion over the correct use of abbreviations and acronyms: http://juicystudio.com/article/abbreviations-acronyms.php

Thanks to Aaron Wall’s latest SEO tool – the instantly popular SEO Toolbar, I was able to get rid of almost all my other SEO addons and scripts, including SEO for Firefox. Even though the SEO toolbar has a button to click to see nofollow links on any given page, the feature can’t be turned on by default for all pages, so that nofollow links are instantly viewable.

So, I modified Joost’s script to highlight all nofollow links with a nice pink background, whether the nofollow is specified within the anchor or Meta tag.

Install the Script, if you like.

Install Greasemonkey

How to install: First, install Greasemonkey with the link above, then click on the “Install the Script” link above that. Greasemonkey will automatically detect that it is a Greasemonkey user script, and will ask if you want to install it.

I’ve seen a whole lot of websites lately that are wasting space (and the time it took to write it) by implementing the Meta Robots tag like this:

1. <meta name="robots" content="all, index, follow" />

If you want search engine bots to crawl and index your website, then just leave it alone. By default, search engines will crawl, index, and archive every page on your website that they can find by following links. You also don’t have to say “all” — every bot that obeys the Robots Meta tag will obey it by default.

So not only is that example pointless because that is the default, it is repeating the same command twice!

Here are some handy uses for the Meta robots tag (these work for Yahoo!, MSN, and Google bots):

Normal talk: Just ignore this page – don’t keep a copy because I don’t want to see it in search engine results. I don’t want you to follow the links on this page, either.

Code:

1. <meta name="robots" content="none" />

(surprised that it’s not “noindex, nofollow”? – that’s just a long and unnecessary of telling search engines to ignore the page completely)

Normal talk: I don’t want to see this page in search results, so don’t keep a copy of this page. You can follow the links on this page, though – those websites deserve credit.

Code:

1. <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />

Normal talk: Take as many copies of this page as you want and hook me up with traffic from your search engine results. Don’t follow the links on this page though, those websites aren’t that great anyways.

Code:

1. <meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow" />

Normal talk: You can make a copy of this page to plug into your algorithm, but don’t give anyone access to it with the “cache” link in search engine results.

Code:

1. <meta name="robots" content="noarchive" />

Normal talk: I don’t want you to pull any text from my website to use in search engine results. Just a link will do. You’re free to index this page and follow all links.

Code:

1. <meta name="robots" content="nosnippet" />

Normal talk: Stop using my Dmoz.org listing description in search results – I want you to use a snippet of text from the page to show users the contextual relevance of my site to their search query.

Code:

1. <meta name="robots" content="noodp" />

(NOODP is an acronym “No Open Directory Project”)

Some Useful Googlebot Meta Tags:

These Meta tags work exclusively in Google (all of these would work with the “robots” name, but since Googlebot is the only bot that officially follows these REP directives, I’ll use “googlebot” or “google”, in the case of the notranslate tag):

Normal talk: Ignore the images on this page – I don’t want to see them in Google Image Search.

Code:

1. <meta name="googlebot" content="noimageindex">

Normal talk: Heads up – this page will be out of commission (deleted, expired, moved, etc.) on this day.

Code:

1. <meta name="googlebot" content="unavailable_after: 13-DEC-2011 11:45:00 PST">

Normal talk: Don’t translate the content on this page into other languages.

Code:

1. <meta name="google" value="notranslate">

! Notice that in this case, the Meta name is “google”, not “googlebot”.

“And returning to the importance of the written content: make it so useful that your visitors will want to link to it. Make it so remarkable they will share it; make it factual so that they will cite it in their blogs, articles, and reports. Finally, make it relevant so that search engines will deem it worthy of great rankings.”
-Me

SEO Book.com just released the ultimate SEO toolbar - and so far, I’m really pleased with it. I’ll even get to delete a few SEO Firefox addons that I won’t be needing anymore.

The goods include all the website overview stats that SEO for Firefox provided (Yahoo links, domain age, Alexa rank, directory links, etc. – visible right on the toolbar), as well as a handy keyword tool that allows you to enter a keyword right in the sidebar and look it up in all the major keyword tools across the web. Very handy indeed. 

To see and download the toolbar, go to http://tools.seobook.com/seo-toolbar/

Skip ahead:

What is a Geo Sitemap?

Geo Sitemaps are very similar to regular sitemap.xml files (both versions are in xml format), but show the latitude and longitude associated with the website, along with information about the placemarker. Here it is in Google’s own words:

” Google Geo Sitemaps is an extension of the Sitemap protocol that enables you to publish geospatial content (geo content) to Google, in order to make it searchable in Google Earth and on Google Maps.”

“With Geo Sitemaps, you can tell Googlebot about your geo content, rather than waiting for us to discover it “in the wild”. While we cannot guarantee when or if your geo content will be added to our GeoSearch index, we are continuously working to improve the coverage, freshness and quality of our index.”

Benefits/Features of a Geo Sitemap

A Geo Sitemap can provide traffic from listings in map-based applications such as Google Maps  and Google Earth. A Geo Sitemap can also help your website listing stand out with the following extra line (Show map of…), which gives users a quick link to a map of your location:

Geo Sitemaps are most important for local businesses or websites that are related to a geographic location. Basically, if your business or website would benefit in any way from traffic searching for you on a geographic basis (i.e. local search), you should have a Geo Sitemap.

Finding Your Coordinates

A simple way to find your coordinates based on a U.S. address is Google’s Position Finder. If you have a Google Account, you can add it to Google Maps and every time you click on a Map, a popup will appear with the coordinates of your search. Another easy option is http://geocoder.us. Copy and paste the latitude and longitude coordinates associated with your address to include in your Geo Sitemap.

1. Creating a KML Geo Sitemap

Open notepad or your favorite XML editor.

1.1 KML Code Example

Copy and paste the following code and make all necessary changes:

1. <kml xmlns="http://www.opengis.net/kml/2.2"
2. xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
3. <Document>
4. <name>Company Name</name>
5. <atom:author>
6. <atom:name>Author Name (may be company name)</atom:name>
7. </atom:author>
8. <atom:link href="http://www.domain.com/" />
9. <Placemark>
10. <name>Name Of Location (e.g. 'Office Location')</name>
11. <description>
12. <![CDATA[
13. <address>
14. <a href="http://www.domain.com/">Company Name</a><br />
15. Address: [street city, state zip]<br />
16. Phone: [phone]
17. </address>
18. <p>A small company description.</p>
19. ]]>
20. </description>
21. <Point>
22. <coordinates>longitude,latitude</coordinates>
23. </Point>
24. </Placemark>
25. </Document>
26. </kml>

Just replace the necessary information like “company name” with your own and feel free to include as many placemarks as you wish (if you have multiple buildings, multiple office locations, etc.). You can view or download my own Geo Sitemap at http://www.newshoemedia.com/geo-sitemap.kml.

Save the file as geo-sitemap.kml (you can name it whatever you like, but keep the .kml extension).

1.2 Uploading the KML sitemap to your server

Upload geo-sitemap.kml to the root directory for your domain, so that it can be accessed by going to www.yourdomain.com/geo-sitemap.kml.

1.3 Including the KML Geo Sitemap in your sitemap.xml

Update: I had this part completely wrong – I understood Google’s documentation to mean that the Geo Sitemap reference can be added inside your regular sitemap.xml file. Instead, Google recommends that you separate your sitemaps based on the type of content the URLs are pointing to.

First, create a Sitemap Index file that references your regular sitemap (with URLs pointing to your HTML pages), your Geo Sitemap, and any other Sitemaps (i.e. Video Sitemap) you want to include.

Now you’ll need to create a XML sitemap that points to your KML sitemap: use this code:

1. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
2. xmlns:geo="http://www.google.com/geo/schemas/sitemap/1.0">
3. <url>
4. <loc>http://www.domain.com/geo-sitemap.kml</loc>
5. <geo:geo>
6. <geo:format>kml</geo:format>
7. </geo:geo>
8. </url>
9. </urlset>

Upload all the XML sitemaps, and the KML sitemap, and Voilà! Next time Google indexes them, it will find your Geo Sitemap.

2. Submit the sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools

You will want to add the sitemap.xml (regular sitemap), geo-sitemap.xml (Geo Sitemap), and the sitemap_index.xml (Sitemap Index)  to Google Webmaster Tools to make sure that Google can find all the pages on your website that you want to be findable in search, and to alert Google that you have a new Geo Sitemap.

Here are the authoritative references for building a Geo Sitemap:

http://code.google.com/apis/kml/documentation/kmlSearch.html
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=94554

3. Common Problem: MIME Type Errors

You won’t be able to validate the KML file if your server isn’t set to send the proper response code. If you are having trouble validating your Geo Sitemap, or if you are able to see the sitemap by typing in the URL in a regular browser, then chances are, your server is treating it as a text/plain document, and not a KML file.

Here is Google’s documentation for KML Mime Types, including how to change your server configuration if needed:  http://code.google.com/apis/kml/documentation/kml_tut.html#kml_server.

I use Google Alerts on a daily basis to to track websites that could provide links to my websites, and to watch the presence and SEO techniques of my  (and my clients’) competition.

What is Google Alerts? Straight from the Alerts homepage:

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news , etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

Here is how Google Alerts can be useful in your online marketing efforts:

1. Keeping an eye on the competition: if you are a plumber in San Diego, you will want to watch the keyword ‘plumber san diego’ and similar variations to watch everything Google is gathering related to San Diego plumbers. Use that information to your benefit by using and improving on some of the tactics that you will find that your competition is using.
2. Creating links: Google Alerts reports links across the web that are pointing to your competition. If they are already linking to someone in your niche/industry, why not link to you, too? Visit the sites Google Alerts sends your way and find out what you need to do to get a link from them. I have found several online business directories and other valuable websites that can send valuable traffic to my website.
3. Watching where/when Google is finding you: You can watch where Google is finding your name, business name, and website through Google Alerts, and you can set Google Alerts to send you this information on a “As-it-happens” basis, so you will know when Google found the keywords you are watching.

Here is a list of some Google Alerts’ uses from Google:

Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:

• monitoring a developing news story
• keeping current on a competitor or industry
• getting the latest on a celebrity or event
• keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams

I have seen a lot of clients get frustrated quickly after I tell them to set up a 301 Permanent Redirect from the non-WWW version of their website to the WWW version. 

Example: Redirect http://domainname.com to http://www.domainname.com

It is important to note that this method only applies to servers running Apache. Be very careful when you change the .htaccess file because it can cause your entire site to fail with a simple typo. I recommend hiring an experienced web designer to do this for you.

First: open your .htaccess file. It should be in the root folder of your website (usually www). If it doesn’t exist, create a new file named .htaccess – that is the entire file name, so don’t add a .txt extension or add anything in front of the period.

Add the following lines  (if there are already some code in the file, add these lines above them):

1. RewriteEngine on
2. RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domainname\.com
3. RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domainname.com/$1 [R=301,L]

REMEMBER: Be extremely careful, and make sure you know what you are doing. Depending on the structure of your website, adding these lines in the wrong place can break your website. 

I am working on a large post explaining what the .htaccess file is and now to use 301 Permanent Redirects for many reasons – I will publish it as soon as possible.

Several of my SEO clients have seen some serious fluctuation after making major changes to the copy or structure of their website, and come to me asking, “Those changes are supposed to help my rankings – but I just dropped out of site! What’s going on?”

Watching search engine rankings decline after paying a bundle on SEO and web design changes can be painful, and you will likely see a temporary decrease in site traffic, but if you can stomach the temporary set-back, you will be better off for it in the long run.

Changing your website may temporarily hurt your rankings, but it will come out on top after some fluctuation.

If you see some fluctuation, don’t let it surprise you. Search engines are just re-evaluating the new content on your site – it has changed a lot since the last time they visited your site, and have to make sure that your site is still relevant to those keywords.

You’ll see some fluctuation – your website rankings will probably drop at first, then shoot up and down for a few weeks like a Californian seismograph, but in my experience, you can count on it coming out on top in the end – with much higher rankings than the website had before.

The good news: it won’t hurt for long. It will usually take between 30 and 60 days to see the improvement you are looking for, but think of what you’ve gained:

• You now have a SE-Optimized website, so you are going to see more traffic in the future for keywords on all of your pages.
• New content will be ready for search engines
• Your website is more user friendly and useful for your visitors
• The optimized content on your website will bring relevant traffic for a very long time – SEO has to be part of your long-term marketing strategy

Tips for redesigning your website without losing SEO value:

• Use 301 Permanent Redirects to redirect users who may be visiting the former pages on your site via bookmark links, old marketing material, or various links around the web. Redirect them to their new equivalents or to relevant pages. Using a 301 Permanent Redirect will preserve the SEO value of the former web pages, and channel them to the proper destination. Links and search engine rankings that pointed to old pages on your site will still be relevant, and the new pages will rank for the same keywords as the previous page did.
• Keep the content that worked for you. And throw out the rest. Keeping the content that your visitors (and search engines) liked will keep them coming, and will reduce the negative fluctuation that will follow the redesign.
• Take advantage of the redesign to do everything right. Make sure your title and meta tags are unique, look over your navigation structure, make sure you are using text links, and proper semantic XHTML structure to aid search engines in determining the structure and heirarchy of your website.