Wednesday 17 March 2010

Google Webmaster Tools for Microsoft Office Live

How can you add your site to Google search engine?
Microsoft Office Live is a generous hosting free tool from Microsoft to put your domain there. It has its own editor for the page that you like to create based on their standards, all "aspx" files. It also includes its own tracking system and reports for analysing traffic on your site. If you want to add pages of your own creation, then you should upload them to Documents gallery of Microsoft Office Live and then you add a "/Documents/yourpage.html" to the URL of your site, like this, "http://www.yoursite.com/Documents/yourpage.html" I use the "aspx" for my pages hence my pages are like this, "/Documents/mypage.aspx" Some people, like me, are keen to use Google Webmaster Tools for further information on their sites. To that end, first your site should be verified by Google Tools. For using Google Webmasters Tools and verification you need to have an account in Google. That is possible by a hotmail account or a googlemail account. One can use either of them. You automatically have that account if you are using the Google Blogger (with an hotmail account it is possible to create a Google Blogger). Once you had that account then you are able to sign into the Google Webmaster Tools (GWT). After logging into the GWT please click on "Add a site" button and give your website URL in the text field that appears after clicking. Google Webmaster Tools goes to a next step for "verification" of your website. At that stage, it gives this instruction: "Copy the meta tag below, and paste it into your site's home page. It should go in the <head> section, before the first <body> section." You need to do that for your home page. There is a way that you can put that meta tag, something like this, <meta name="google-site-verification" content="hfxUPa-C1mRTlTS0f_Z45dFZ_8bCUBjHtNy5Z1upn3A" /> in a Microsoft Office Live hosted "home page." (That long string for your site would be different from mine.) When you are editing your website on Microsoft Office Live, it opens an editor as "Microsoft Office Live Small Business Web Design Tool." In that editor, there are two tabs: "Page Editor" and "Site Designer." Select "Page Editor" tab. In the far right, at the top, there is an "Advanced" pane. Still, in the right side of that pane, there are three icons stacked at the top of each other. Click the middle one. When you hover on it, its tool tip shows "Change page title, Navigation order, Meta tags." If you click here, it opens your Home page "Properties" dialogue. Upon opening the "Properties Dialogue" it shows two tabs, "Page Settings" and "Search Engine Optimization." Choose the second one. In the "Search Engine Optimization," there are two panes, two text areas at the top of each other. Paste the Google meta tag into the top one, that is, in the "Keyword metatags." You should change your meta tag to html readable metatags, like this %20 %3Cmeta name=%22google-site-verification%22 content=%22hfxUPa-C1mRTlTS0f_Z45dFZ_8bCUBjHtNy5Z1upn3A%22%3E%20  This is called URL encoding. You cannot use normal HTML tags. You have to use ASCII codes with a "%" sign before them. For example a blank space is shown by "%20" Read more here about them. Then click on "Apply" button and then "OK" As you noticed this is the "Properties" dialogue of your home page, therefore you can bring it, alternatively, by going to Microsoft Office Live Small Business Web Site Page Manager page and in front of your Home page click on "properties" link. If you are designing a page, on your own HTML codes, simply put that metatag after <HEAD> of your HTML that you are uploading to the documents gallery, much easier. Anyway, after these operations, go back to Google Webmaster Tools and click on "Verify" When verification becomes complete click on the name of your site, it takes you to your dashboard. Here, one can find different search items. At the bottom right of the dashboard you can find the place that you can submit your sitemap. It is necessary that the site map to be written on a note pad and saved as a UTF-8 file with extension ".xml" as "Sitemap.xml" and then to be uploaded to "Documents Gallery" of Microsoft Office Live of yours. It has such a structure:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://messiahpsychoanalyst.org/</loc>
<lastmod>2010-03-15</lastmod>
<changefreq>Monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://messiahpsychoanalyst.org/Documents/ceramics.aspx</loc>
<lastmod>2010-03-15</lastmod>
<changefreq>Weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset >
My website is http://www.messiahpsychoanalyst.org/. Yours could by "http://www.your&site.com/" (hosted on Microsoft Office Live) But notice that in the sitemap.xml I have removed "www" It is due to the fact that when you click on "Submit sitemap" in the Google Webmaster Tools the place holder for the URL of your site has got the URL by default as http://your&site.com/ and there is a text field in front of it where one needs to type "Documents/Sitemap.xml" and then follows the instructions after. If you do not remove "www" from "Sitemap.xml" an inconsistency will happens with errors. In the above Sitemap.xml I have put only two pages. You can repeat it for as many pages as you have. Please note the format of date items. That should be, yyyy-mm-dd. Other formats create error for Google crawlers. When you are creating pages, it is good to paste the meta tag given by the Google Webmaster Tools inside the "Head" part of each page.