Page Title Search Engine Optimization
Page Titles are one of the most important elements when a search engine such as Google comes to index your site. eBlog Templates has an interesting article on how to optimize your pages titles, and how the order of keywords (from left-to-right) is important:
Improve Your Google Rankings in One Easy Step
This useful article will show you exactly how to edit your Blogger page titles. But, naturally, the same logic applies to all sites.
Keyword analysis with Google Insights for Search
A large majority of your visitors are likely to be arriving via Google's search engine. You're probably already aware of the most popular keywords for your site (for example, from Google Analytics).
Google Insights for Search is a very useful tool for researching your most popular keywords. Research may include finding related search terms, spotting seasonal trends, or geographic distribution. All of which can then be useful for search engine optimization.
Google provides useful examples for all these scenarios here, and here.
More on Google Blog Search
Seems that the problems with Google Blog Search indexing the whole page are a side-effect of an earlier fix to work around partial feeds:
Google Blog Search Changes How It Indexes Posts
I have not found a good solution, other than keeping the blog to the left-side. I recently tried using the CSS style 'float:left', to bring my sidebar over, but it was still indexed before the post. Actually, I was quite impressed that Googlebot picked up on that.
To be fair, Google Blog Search is clearly labelled as 'BETA', but I wonder what's really going on - some posts do seem to be correctly indexed.
GoogleBot is indexing my left sidebar!
I think I've worked out what Google doesn't like about this site. The posts are now getting indexed again, but Google Blog Search is only showing the first few, and omitting the rest of the pages for being too similar.
Indeed, when you see them on Google Blog Search, they are very similar. The left-hand sidebar is being included before the body of each post.
It looks like I'm going to have to re-arrange the template HTML, so that the post body is included before both sidebars. Not something I'm looking forward to...
Live Search Webmaster Center
Okay, so Microsoft also has an equivalent site tool, known as Live Search Webmaster Center. Like the others, it's fairly simple, and gives an insight into what the Live Search engine knows about your site.
Overall, it's nice enough, but I did notice the meta tag was not picked up if I added it before the closing </head> tag (putting it right after the opening <head> tag solved this).
Yahoo! Site Explorer
If you've used Google Webmaster Tools, then Yahoo! Site Explorer should feel very familiar. Having authenticated yourself as the site owner (either by adding a meta tag, or uploading a file), you can view crawl statistics and manage site feeds.
Obviously, this is a useful tool for checking how well Yahoo! is getting on with your site, and what kind of keywords are bringing in the most visitors.
Ping your Blog with Feed Ping
Many search sites offer a pinging service, whereby your blog can notify (ping) them that something new has been posted.
Feed Ping is a free service offering to ping a number these sites. Take a look for yourself - the list is quite extensive.
If you haven't already done so, you should try it at least once. If it makes a noticeable difference, consider re-pinging on a regular basis.
