8×10Gallery.com

Over the past few months (since I decided to start this site) I’ve been studying the art and craft of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It’s a fascinating subject, but truly does reveal that the Internet really is just smoke and mirrors. Aside from that, it lead me to make all sorts of changes to the structure and format of the site. None of the things you normally see, more of the filenames, the image tags, the keywords and descriptions associated with the pages. It’s an ongoing process, but my work has finally started to bare fruit.

With the help of the CoffeeCup Google Sitemapper and UltraEdit, the site has well over 1,000 pages indexed and is now beginning to show up in Google searches for certain keywords. Many of the pages began to disappear after I made several critical errors (spaces in the names of files, incorrect titles for pages) as I described previously. All those pages have finally been purged out and the correct pages are now being indexed. I have also found the magic PING commands to let the search engines know when I’ve done a major update. Now I can coax all the “bots” to come and pay me a visit without having to manually submit everything.

I’ve been working on the site for about 5 months now and things are moving along quite nicely. There is steady growth within the site and I can see more pieces of the site becoming available through searches. It’s said it takes about 6 months before a site is really even visible through Google. If that’s the case then I am right on track and things should continue to flourish from here.

I do have to say that Google makes it so easy to submit and update a site, whereas Yahoo! makes things a little more difficult. We won’t even discuss MSN. They have so far to go before I will even recognize them as a search tool.

I mentioned before that I am using the CoffeeCup Google Sitemapper to create the sitemap for this site. The really useful part of the program is that you can see the map on the screen so you can see all the headings and titles that you’ve used throughout the site. At a glance you can see your Title Pages, the name of the HTML files used etc. This is how I uncovered all the mistakes I’d made on the site.

For example I had spaces in the filenames. An Internet No-No.
- None of the Picture Gallery index pages were numbered so they all looked the same.
- None of the Picture Gallery pages had the correct titles. Some had the name of the folders from my hard drive as the gallery title. Not very useful.
- I didn’t use the same words in the title for pages in the same gallery. Some places I spelled out the word, other I abbreviated.
- I found spelling errors in the titles.

And all sorts of other things.

The main problem was the spaces in the filenames. The sitemapper changed these to a “+” plus sign so all the filenames were wrong when they were parsed by Google. Pages started to disappear out of the index since they couldn’t be found!

It was time to do a massive overhaul of my naming structure. Not only did I have to rename all the graphics files to remove the spaces in the name I had to change every HTML file that referenced them so they would load correctly.

As I contemplated the mess I’d made, I almost decided to scrap the site and start over. After staring blankly at the screen for several minutes I came up with an idea. I had a theory on how to salvage the site.

I knew I could rename all the files very quickly using CKRename. It’s a small app that allows string substitutions for files. I could replace the space with the underscore or any other changes, that part was easy, but how to change the filename in every HTML file without opening every one of them?

I ended up using UltraEdit which has a Replace in Files function which does exactly what I need. You give the search string, the replace string and then pick the directory it should work on. At first it seemed almost too easy. There is no way it could be this simple to get myself out of this. But it was!

The Replace in File function blasted through each gallery and fixed all the filenames in a matter of seconds! I was absolutely amazed! I made all these changes right on the server. I don’t think there’s anyway I could have done this using Expression Web.

Now that I had a way to change text in all my files I decided to make quite a few changes. I updated a bunch of the picture titles to something that was meaningful. I adjusted tons of descriptions within a slew of the HTML files. The more I fixed, the more I saw that needed to be fixed.

It took about 3 hours to clean up after myself, but that includes changing thousands of filenames and adjusting hundreds of web pages. What I thought was going to take a few weeks to fix only took a few hours.

I can’t say the site is perfect, but it’s so much better than it used to be. At least the correct words and phrases will get indexed now rather than information no one will use or search for.

And now that I know how to make these mass changes I may continue to update the titles to make sure they’re useful and accurate. Hopefully you won’t make the same stupid mistake I did, but if you do, there’s a pretty simple answer. CKRename will change all your filenames and UltraEdit will change all references within your HMTL files.

Here’s to not being an idiot in the future!

I have been using CoffeeCup Google Sitemapper to build a sitemap for Google as well as for the site itself. It’s amazing what gets revealed when you see the whole site at once!

CoffeeCup goes through and shows all the top level HTM files and builds a map of the structure. As I looked through the heading I noticed lots of inconsistencies. I used different names, different abbreviations, nothing had a Page 1, Page 2, etc next to it. Quite frankly, it was a mess!

With the map in hand I went through and pretty much renamed everything. I figure if I can’t visually make sense of this site, then Google and Yahoo will never make it through alive!

So now all the related pages have the same title, they’re numbered so you know how many pages there are, they have consistent keywords, and consistent page descriptions. Had I done this all along it would have only taken a few minutes to keep the site organized. But since I put 18 galleries up and didn’t check any of them, it took me hours to fix this nonsense.

I have also been using the CoffeeCup Sitemapper to create my Google and Yahoo sitemaps in XML format. It has been very helpful with that! You can exclude portions of the site, skip over PHP code and choose which types of files you want included. Right now I have over 550 pages indexed with Google and each time a gallery gets added or I make significant changes I make a new sitemap and submit it. I have to say, the CoffeeCup Google Sitemapper has been very helpful with this! I use it directly on the server to index everything. It parses through the files on the server itself and picks up on everything. To make the HTML sitemap it goes with the top level hierarchy and builds the map from that.

Since Expression Web doesn’t have a sitemap utility built in (I will now feign surprise!) this is a great little add-on. And for around $20 it’s a damn good deal. You can get the Sitemapper at http://www.coffeecup.com/google-sitemapper/. And as a real cool bonus and because I am an Internet Coupon Code fiend, if you use the code: 226sTs when ordering, you will save 20% off the total price. This coupon should work with any purchase. Since they make a ton of web apps and the Sitemapper is working so well for me, I’m tempted to try some of their other offerings. I might look at their menu builder if this site becomes a lot bigger. Sliding menus would be cool! 

Hopefully the site is stable now and will get better indexing and ranking scores with Google. It’s hard to find things when you have it all misspelled isn’t it?

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