webmaster tools

When I started to write a post about keywords and meta tags, I got sidetracked into checking the sitemaps for my clients’ websites. Google has a whole gaggle of tools. (I apologize for that- it’s cheesy, I know.) One of these is webmaster tools.

Once you set up your account, after making sure all your code is in order, you submit your site to the great search god. In addition to keywords and meta tags, google likes sitemaps. A sitemap is a page/file of plain code (xml) that lists the pages included in you site and the frequency that they are updated. I downloaded a new Dreamweaver® extension, generated a new sitemap for my own site (I prefer to be my own guinea pig and never take chances with clients’ sites) and discovered that google wasn’t accepting it. This led me to the site: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com which generates sitemaps for free. This wasn’t foolproof either, but I soon discovered the problem. If you submit a site to google as “http://mycompany.com”, then all the pages in your sitemap must be in the form: “http://mycompany.com/pageone.html”. If you submit a site to google as “http://www.mycompany.com”, then all the pages in your sitemap must be in the form: “http://www.mycompany.com/pageone.html”.

If you’re like me, and just start typing a company name into the url & letting the browser fill it in for you, you might never notice which sites come up as "www" and which do not. You used to need the "www", but that’s no longer the case, and while “http://mycompany.com” and “http://www.mycompany.com” are exactly the same page, google is really just a collection of computers, and they are sticklers for details.

Computers are sticklers for details because they can’t read written language- they read binary code. EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER you type is translated into binary, therefore while you may view a ‘space’ as nothing, a computer sees it as “00100000”. You can test this out by googling “convert to binary” and visiting one of the free sites that allow you to input text and get binary code back. That’s how I got this background- it says “website wisdom” and “inside design”!

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