#Alabama#Alaska#American Samoa#Arizona#Arkansas#California#Colorado#Connecticut#Delaware#District of Columbia#Florida#Georgia#Guam#Hawaii#Idaho#Illinois#Indiana#Iowa#Kansas#Kentucky#Louisiana#Maine#Maryland#Massachusetts#Michigan#Minnesota#Mississippi#Missouri#Montana#Nebraska#Nevada#New Hampshire#New Jersey#New Mexico#New York#North Carolina#North Dakota#Northern Marianas Islands#Ohio#Oklahoma#Oregon#Pennsylvania#Puerto Rico#Rhode Island#South Carolina#South Dakota#Tennessee#Texas#Utah#Vermont#Virginia#Virgin Islands#Washington#West Virginia#Wisconsin#Wyoming

And here is the entire string, including “State” as a label:

State#Alabama#Alaska#American Samoa#Arizona#Arkansas#California#Colorado#Connecticut#Delaware#District of Columbia#Florida#Georgia#Guam#Hawaii#Idaho#Illinois#Indiana#Iowa#Kansas#Kentucky#Louisiana#Maine#Maryland#Massachusetts#Michigan#Minnesota#Mississippi#Missouri#Montana#Nebraska#Nevada#New Hampshire#New Jersey#New Mexico#New York#North Carolina#North Dakota#Northern Marianas Islands#Ohio#Oklahoma#Oregon#Pennsylvania#Puerto Rico#Rhode Island#South Carolina#South Dakota#Tennessee#Texas#Utah#Vermont#Virginia#Virgin Islands#Washington#West Virginia#Wisconsin#Wyoming

Cforms II is the best Wordpress Plugin out there for building forms – visit their site for more information.

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”.

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 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.