Website Structure Resources - Search Engine Marketing

The structure of your website - its directories, its file naming conventions, its use or misuse of HTML, Adobe, Word, Flash, etc. - can have a huge secondary impact on your search engine visibility, especially for technology companies. Here are some resources and links that I like about how best to structure your website for search engine success.

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Google on 301 Redirects
If you are changing your website structure, please use 301 redirects to redirect traffic from your old pages to your new pages. This URL explains how Google wants you to do it, properly.
  http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=93633&hl=en

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Google Webmaster Blog
This is the official blog from Google, and very useful to keep up-to-date with their most recent news and new developments.
  http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/

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Sitemap.org
Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.
  http://www.sitemap.org/

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Google Webmaster Help
Webmaster essentials from Google. Includes Google's official statements on SEO. To be taken with a grain of salt, because Google obviously has a huge vested interest in no one understanding how its algorithms work and thus being able to 'manipulate' search results.
  http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/

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Google Webmaster Tools
By Google, about Google. Learn how to improve your visibility in Google's search results.
  http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=8F37FE1AB0B7FC3E

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Google Webmasters Site
Google has a micro site devoted just to the needs of Web owners. First you verify that you own the website, then in combination with Google analytics you can get all sorts of information about your website and how Google perceives you.
  http://www.google.com/webmasters/

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Robots Exclusion Standard @ Wikipedia (Robots.txt)
A robots.txt file on a website will function as a request that specified robots ignore specified files or directories in their search. This might be, for example, out of a preference for privacy from search engine results, or the belief that the content of the selected directories might be misleading or irrelevant to the categorization of the site as a whole, or out of a desire that an application only operate on certain data. For...
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_Exclusion_Standard

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Web Robots Pages
Web Robots (also known as Web Wanderers, Crawlers, or Spiders), are programs that traverse the Web automatically. Search engines such as Google use them to index the web content, spammers use them to scan for email addresses, and they have many other uses. On this site you can learn more about web robots. About /robots.txt explains what /robots.txt is, and how to use it. The FAQ answers many frequently asked questions, such as How do...
  http://www.robotstxt.org/

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Google (and Yahoo!) Sitemap Generator for Windows
Google Sitemaps allows the webmaster to help Google index their pages optimally. The GSiteCrawler will help you generate the best Google Sitemap file for your website. The GSiteCrawler uses different ways to find all the pages in your website and can generate all sorts of files, statistics and more. The sitemaps file format has lately been also adapted by Yahoo! - even MSN/Live.com is pledging it's support.
  http://gsitecrawler.com/

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Robots.txt File Generator
Use this tool to generate your Robots.txt file.
  http://tools.seobook.com/robots-txt/generator/

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SEO Tools - Robots.txt Generator
Use this tool to generate a simple robots.txt file for your website. This file allows you to hide files or directories that you don't wish the search engine spiders to find. This generator tool is designed to create the text for the file for you; you can then make changes afterward should you deem it necessary. Generating a robot file with this tool is ideal if you wish to block certain directories or files from search engines. To use...
  http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/robots-generator/

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XML Sitemaps.com - Sitemap Generator
Creating Sitemaps for Google, MSN and Yahoo! - The Easy Way If you own or maintain a website or intend to own one, wouldn't it be great if you get frequent visitors who find satisfaction in getting exactly the information they need from your page?
  http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/