Web Design and SEO News and Tips

Yahoo! Sitemaps

• January 30th, 2007

Back to sitemaps again! Yahoo! and MSN Search have agreed to use the same protocol that Google uses for sitemaps. You can actually now go and submit an your xml formatted Google sitemap to Yahoo! and it will accept it and use it for gathering information about your site.

Signing up is easy. Just go to Yahoo’s Site Explorer page and login using your Yahoo! ID (you have one if you have a Yahoo! email address or use other account-based features). If you don’t have an ID, just click “Sign In” and on the resulting page choose “Sign Up” and follow the instructions.

Once you have your ID, sign in and then enter your site’s URL and click Add Site. Once your site is added you will be able to authenticate. As with the Google authentication process, this lets Yahoo! know that you are for sure the owner of the site. You will be instructed to download a file and then upload that file to your server.

When you’ve been authenticated you will be able to add a sitemap. To do this, click on Manage, then on the next screen enter the URL of your sitemap and click Add Feed.

I haven’t yet found a way to submit an xml sitemap to MSN so presumably they are still working on it.

A Fourth Photoshop CS3 Favorite

• January 30th, 2007

I forgot to mention another new feature I really like in the Photoshop CS3 beta preview. When you go to resize an image using the Image>Image Size command, you can now specify whether you are enlarging or reducing an image’s size and it will use the best formula for that task. If you are reducing an image’s size, you can choose “Bicubic Sharper” and it will actually sharpen the image as it reduces the size, thus saving you the extra step of going to filters and applying the sharpen yourself (you do sharpen your images when you reduce them, don’t you?). It works really well and I love it!

My Three Favorite New Features in Photoshop CS3

• January 29th, 2007

Adobe recently took the unprecedented step of offering a public beta of the next version of Photoshop several months before it becomes commercially available. I’ve been using the beta version for a couple of weeks now, and here are my three favorite new features:

1. Smart Filters. If you’ve ever applied a filter to an image and later wished you hadn’t or wished you could change the settings, you’re in luck. Photoshop CS3’s smart filters are non-destructive, meaning that even after you’ve saved your Photoshop file, you can go back and edit the filter or remove it altogether. Wow! Each smart filter you apply becomes a sub-layer that you can turn on and off, just like layer styles. If you apply more than one smart filter, you can change the blending modes between the sub-layers for some interesting effects. The power of smart filters is simply amazing!

2. Refine Selection. Have you ever wished you could have a live preview of selection refinements such as feather, expand, contract, etc? If so, wish no more. CS3 has you covered. Make your selection as usual, then choose Select>Refine Edge and you will be given a dialog with several sliders and buttons. As you move the sliders, your image updates with the changes. Feathering an image has never been so good!

3. Black and White Conversion. Now, instead of choose Desaturate to turn color images to grayscale (or any of the other ways it can be done), you can control the whole process of converting to grayscale with a new dialog box called simply Black and White. This has color sliders that let you control how each color in the original image is allowed to influence the resulting grayscale image. It also has a tint feature (just click the tint check box) with hue and saturation controls so that you can give your image a tint–sepia for instance. All this can be done as an adjustment layer, so the it can be refined at a later stage if necessary.

There are lots of improvements in the new version of Photoshop, but those three are my favorites at the moment.

More About Google Sitemaps

• January 27th, 2007

A Google sitemap is a specially prepared xml file that gives Google information about every page on your web site (except those you maybe don’t want it to know about–such as a shopping cart checkout page, for example). This xml file gives the URL of each page, the date and time that it was last updated, how frequently it gets updated and how important the page is relative to other pages on the site (note that Google treats this last bit of information as nothing more than a suggestion).

I recommend that even if your site is small, you do not create this sitemap file manually, unless you’re particularly trying to impress yourself (or someone else) with your skills at writing xml files. I use (and highly recommend as the best option I’ve found) a program called GSiteCrawler. It does almost all the work for you. All you have to do is download and install the program (it’s free!) and then enter some basic information about your site and let it do it’s thing. It will crawl your web site and assemble a list of all your pages. You can then go through and assign the importance of each page if you wish (or leave it them all at the default importance level of 0.5). You then tell it to create the sitemap. All you do then is upload it to your server and then log into your Google Sitemaps account and tell Google about your sitemap. You do this by simply clicking the “Add Sitemap” next to your site name on the main page and following the instructions (which amounts to telling it what kind of sitemap it is and the filename and url of the file).

If you have a WordPress blog (like this one you’re reading) things are even easier for you. All you have to do is download and install the Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress plugin, set a few parameters, and then every time you post to your blog, the plugin generates a new sitemap, uploads it to your server, and pings Google to tell it there has been an update. What could be easier?

What could be easier, of course, is to let me take care of all this for you!

Google Sitemaps

• January 26th, 2007

If you own a web site and are interested in search engine results, you should definitely use Google Sitemaps. This is a free service that Google introduced some time back to help web site owners make sure their site is getting indexed properly by Google.

The process is fairly simple. First of all you will need a Google account. If you use any of the other Google services (such as Gmail or Google Checkout) you already have an account. If you don’t have an account, you can sign up for one. Once you’ve signed up, go to Google Sitemaps and sign in.

Once you’ve signed in, you should see the words “Add Site” with a box for you to enter your site’s main URL and an example below it to show you how it’s done. Enter your site address and then click OK. If your site is already in Google’s index, you’ll now see some basic information about your site. However, to unlock the REAL power of Google sitemaps you need to do two more things: VERIFY and SUBMIT A SITEMAP.

Verifying is a simple process that PROVES to Google that you own the site and are authorized to make changes to the site. It also opens the way for Google to give you lots more information about the indexing of your site.

The simplest way to verify your site is to click “Verify” and then follow the instructions for creating a blank html file and then uploading it to your webserver. Be careful to name the file exactly as they say (you can do this by copying and pasting the filename). Then, click on “verify” again and you’re done.

If your site is already in Google’s index, you’ll now be able to view much more information than before verification, such as the distribution of pagerank throughout your site, any errors encountered as your site was crawled, query stats (what people typed in to find your site), etc. The diagnostic information is crucial if Google is having problems indexing your site.

If your site isn’t already in Google’s index, there obviously won’t be any information.

One of the ways you can help Google find out more about your site is by using a properly formatted sitemap. I’ll explain how to do that in my next post.

Yet Another Blog!

• January 25th, 2007

Hopefully this new blog will serve at least two purposes: provide some insights into the world of graphics and web site design and marketing, and help my site get better coverage in the search engines. Google in particular seems to absolutely LOVE blogs. I recently revamped the blog for my online bookstore and moved it to a subdomain. It’s already getting great rankings on Google (in effect giving me double listings for some search terms) and the home page already has a PageRank 5! So I’m out to see if the same magic will work for this site also.

One thing to look out for when optimizing blogs for the search engines is getting the right words into the first part of your title tag and also your permalink structure. If you use a permalink structure that puts the title of your post into the URL, this is more helpful for search rankings than using the date or number method of permalinks.

Watch this space. Hopefully I’ll be posting my thoughts on a variety of topics related to web design, graphic design, and search engine marketing.