The rumor of a new Google Dance was around several blogs and some bloggers stated that at the end on July we would get a new shake on our PR’s. They were right and it happened few days ago.

Before this shake Binary Ant didn’t have PR yet and now this blog shows PR2. I didn’t expected a higher one because I didn’t work very hard in my link building. When I was running my Spanish blog I jumped from unasigned PR to PR3 and I must confess that it disappointed me because perhaps I expected to jump to PR4. I worked quite more the link building in that occasion.

So now I have PR2, not too bad to the little work done. This means that Binary Ant is growing day by day. Also Alexa’s and Compete’s ranks are improving too.

It is true that two months ago this blog had more activity but now I’m running a couple of web projects in which I’m testing my new marketing knowledge. I’m testing tools and strategies following the well known tactic of “trial & error”. I think it has no sense to talk about marketing without the real experience of success so I prefer to wait to have solid results before give some advice.

Finally a SEO advice to improve your PR: work on your link building. Get as many external links as possible, no matter how irrelevant a link could be, a link is a link and it is worth to get it. Where you can get links?

• From forums, place your link in your sign.
• From web directories: look for directories to include your site.
• From comments in other blogs: look for “dofollow” blogs and leave there some words.
• From other blogs if a link exchange is possible, but this point involve two-way links so I put less importance over this one unless the other blog had a very interesting PR.

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Just a quick word to tell you that next Tuesday 8th of July Google will offer a free webinar about three of the most powerful tools Google has for webmasters:

• Google Webmaster Tools:a resource to gauge the visibility of your pages on Google.
• Google Analytics: the most free useful stats tracker for your websites, it allows you to know your geographical stats, the performance of your landing pages, Adwords, keywords and many other functions.
• Google Website Optimizer: a tool that gathers information about your site that you can use to find leaks in the performance and other ways to improve your web.

As I told you all of this is for free and via Internet. If you are interested in attend this webinar here you have the article of the Official Google Blog where you have available more information and the link to register.

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I thought It was further than it really is. But you can see it with your own eyes:

ipv6.google.com

Did you see it? Surely you are thinking I’m pulling your leg. Well, if you don´t have an IPv6 Internet connection there is nothing you can see.

What’s IPv6? Why? Nowadays we are using an Internet Protocol called IPv4. The problem is that this protocol has its limits really near and Google reckons that this limits will be reached in 2011. With IPv6 this problem disappears.

I wrote this post only thinking in your astonished face when the link showed nothing . More info here.

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A Sitemap? What is that? Well it seems that you didn’t read paragraphs 3 and 4 of my article Basic Errors I See In Other Blogs. A sitemap is a file which indicates to the spiderbot all the pages (well depends on how updated the sitemap is) that compose your blog or website. Thus the robot does not have to follow all the internal links it finds on your blog to index your pages. With the sitemap the robot gets all the information faster. Remember that every article you wrote in your blog is a page. Using a sitemap is highly recommended by the search engines.

If you use WordPress you’re lucky because there is a plugin that do it all for you. This plugin is the Google Sitemaps Generator. The installation instructions are the same as for any other plugin, but beware that the plugin creates sitemap in the base directory of your blog so you should give the right privileges to write in it.

Once you have installed the plugin a new tab appears in the settings menu, XML-Sitemap. The options listed by default (I think) are most recommended. I checked Notify YAHOO about updates of your Blog for which you need an Application ID but don’t worry because it is free and you can ask for one clicking on the link that appear below the box where you have to write the ID.

In Sitemap Content I checked only the following options to avoid creating too unnecessarily duplicate content:

1. Homepage.
2. Posts.
3. Static pages.

If you have a robot.txt file you have to indicate in it where is the sitemap, add the line

Sitemap: http://www.tusitio.com/sitemap.xml.gz

This file ends with .xml.gz because it is compressed to take up less disk space. If you don’t have one mark the option Modify or create robots.txt file… so the plugin will create one automatically. Basically it contains the location of the sitemap.

As I told you the default options are the recommended, without getting into too much complication. Once finished with preferences at the top you have a link whick says “Build sitemap.” By clicking on it the file sitemap.xml is generated. If you find some problem probably is that you didn’t apply the correct privileges on the base directory. That’s all :D, from now this plugin will update your sitemap.xml file every time you write or update an article.

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