complicated simplicity

One of the many things people fail to realise when they use Content Management Systems like Wordpress or Joomla is that because the pages are dynamically generated, search engines fail to index many of the pages properly. Google realises this and has a set of developer tools to help developers allow beter indexing of the pages. The trouble is that not many people actually know it, or use it.

This set of tools called Google Webmaster Tools. It allows the administrators to ensure that their websites are correctly and well indexed by Google.

One of the most important features for dynamically generated content is the ability to upload a sitemap to Google. Wordpress has a plugin which allows such a sitemap to be dynamically generated and submitted to Google. This sitemap is quite literally a map of your site to allow Google to know where everything is and makes it search engine friendly.

Another good feature of GWT is the ability to check on how Googlebot actually ’sees’ your site, and the results possibly returned about your site. It also shows up to the top 100 keywords which Google uses to return your site from the search results.