After we were able to get our site working properly, the wonderful Google bot came by our site, as expected, and followed the link to BlueJacketsBuzz.com. Within a couple of hours, the new site was indexed and can now be found in Google. It is only one page at this point (there aren’t many pages to the entire site yet), but it is now indexed in Google - step one of the mission is complete. Of course, the only way to find it at this point is to search for the actual URL, so having this page indexed serves very little purpose at this stage of the game.
The next thing we are going to do is create an XML sitemap for Google. The quickest and easiest way to do this is to use the XML Sitemap Generator tool, entering the URL for the site to have its sitemap created. Within a few seconds, you will have an XML sitemap to save and load to your own site. There is some tweaking that should be done to that XML file before loading to your site, such as making sure the pages included are pages you want Google to find and index, as well as giving each page a priority between 0.9 and 0.1, with the homepage getting a 0.9 priority and other pages mixed in based on how you would prioritize them. Once this is done and uploaded to your site (make sure it can be found at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml), then you will want to be a part of Google’s Webmaster Central, and let them know that you have a sitemap created for your site. The details of this will be reserved for another post, but you need to create an account in the Webmaster Tools section of Google Webmaster Central and enter the information about the sitemap you just created. Before long, all of those pages will be indexed by Google as well.
The last part of this phase of the case study is to clean up what is the single most important aspect of search engine optimization - and that is the Title tag. The title tag we had been using was displaying: bluejacketsbuzz.com. That’s it. Free SEO Tip - Please note that using your domain name in the title tag is a terrible waste of a very valuable asset. Your title tag should include something that people would actually type into a search engine when they want to find your site. They aren’t going to be using your URL, otherwise they wouldn’t need the search engine (besides, if they do enter your URL into a search engine, they will find your site anyway - even without having it in the title tag.) In our case, we want to target “Blue Jackets Buzz” and “Columbus Blue Jackets Blog“. Therefore, both of these phrases now make up the title tag for this site, separated by a dash. Now we’ll wait and see if we can get ranked for these two keyword phrases. Really, this should be enough to get listed. It will probably take more work and some worthwhile content to get the #1 spot, but this is how you should begin the process of great SEO for your site.