Here’s a quick way to find out how many pages in your website are in the Google index. In the Google search window, type “site:” followed by your domain. For this site, I would type in “site:mcbuzz.com” and hit return.

The list that results is all the pages in your site that Google has spidered (read through using web page-reading software) and added to its index. If you don’t see all your site’s pages, that’s not good — unless you don’t want people to find those pages!

Next I will talk about what to do if your pages aren’t listed.

MORE WEB MARKETING TIPS
Web Marketing Tip #2: Use XML Sitemap Generator to Get All Your Website’s Pages Indexed by Google

Web Marketing Tip #3: Submit an XML Sitemap to Google

Web Marketing Tip #4: Use Keywords in Web Page Titles

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This morning a client asked me if I wouldn’t mind sending him an e-mail with instructions on how to create and edit pages on his website using WordPress. Aha!

This was a great opportunity to do what I’m calling “Web-Directed Marketing”: taking material that you create to promote your business, answer customers’ questions, etc. and - rather than use it for that one purpose only - put it immediately onto your website, as well.

The result is a new WordPress Tutorials page on the mcbuzz.com website: How to Insert Images Using WordPress

Instructions on how to edit a website using WordPress are a good example of Web-Directed Marketing because, obviously, my client is not the only person who can benefit from the material. Other clients of mine can benefit, and - big key here - so can people who don’t even know about my business yet.

It takes roughly the same amount of time to answer a question in an e-mail to a single customer as it does to put the answer into a format that other people can access on the Web. Obviously, getting your answer out to a ton of people on the Web is going to give your business more visibility than sending a single e-mail. And you can always do both.

The great thing about this approach is, even if you have already taken time to send an e-mail other people might learn from, it doesn’t mean that time was spent inefficiently. On the contrary, it means you already have the content you need for a good website or blog post! All you need to do is take a few minutes to put it up on your site.

Certainly, there are some e-mails you are not going to want to share with a broader audience, but why not consider retooling the contents so that they don’t contain any private information? If another client or prospective client asks you a similar question without referring to any specifics, that’s exactly what you would do to give them an answer, right? You can do that on your website or blog.

I will talk more about all the positive benefits this kind of “Web-Directed Marketing” approach can have. I said something about it here: Google’s Success Can Mean Web Marketing Success for Your Website and Your Business - on the old Making Communications Buzz blog.

The other point I want to make is this: A WordPress website makes Web-Directed Marketing possible for small businesses - because it is so easy to put new material on your website. You don’t need a webmaster. You don’t need a marketing department.

You do need to know how to use a computer well enough to use a web browswer and program like Microsoft Word. And you do need to know your business - meaning that you need to know your product or service inside and out, and you need to know what your customers and prospective customers are looking for.

With a WordPress website, you can put all the right kinds of information onto your site quickly and easily. By doing so in the next 6-12 months, you can set yourself apart from much, if not most, of your competition in a very significant way. And when your competitors wake up to the reality of web-directed marketing for small business, you will have been there, done that. Sound good? It is.

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Quotable: “When you hand the keys over to the mob, they’ll drive wherever they want to go.”

A great story on the front page of the L.A. Times today raises all kinds of interesting questions about the future of Search ranking, social networking, censorship and piracy (copyright) on the Web.

User rebellion at Digg.com unearths a can of worms
The site relents and lets members post a code that aids piracy despite threats of legal action.
By Alex Pham and Joseph Menn, L.A. Times

Digg.com is an influential social networking site that ranks news stories and blogs by allowing members to cast votes in their favor. You can find a Digg icon in the “SAVE AND SHARE” panel of the L.A. Times website. and it’s the first icon under the “SHARE” link on the New York Times article listed at the end of this post. With enough votes, a story can appear on the Digg.com home page, and this can significantly increase the number of visitors to the site carrying the story.

In addition to the increase in traffic that can come from Digg.com itself, sites that appear on the Digg.com home page also get an accompanying boost in search engine ranking. Digg.com is an authoritative website with 34,000 sites linking to it and a Google PageRank of 8/10 (i.e., huge). When Digg.com links to a site, it imparts some of its authority to that site, “authority” = better rank in search engines. Users may also decide to link to a site they see on Digg.com, boosting its ranking even further.

When Digg owners tried to remove references on Digg to a bit of code that allows people to make pirated copies of HD DVDs, users revolted by voting in favor of any and all pages displaying the code. Digg rankings were flooded these pages, effectively disabling the site.

Now Digg owners have decided to allow the code to remain on their site, which means they face a costly lawsuit from the DVD industry, a lawsuit that could potentially bring an end to Digg.com.

Who really runs Digg.com? The authority of sites like Digg.com is based, ostensibly, on ideals like free speech and the democratic nature of the Web. But, as the L.A. Times article notes, Digg owners already take down references to pirated copies of Photoshop software from their site. Where should Digg draw the line?

As companies like Google and News Corp. spend billions of dollars to harness the advertising power of social networking sites like YouTube and MySpace, it will be very interesting to see just how much they will be willing to let hoi polloi the People decide their fate.

Related Article:

In Web Uproar, Antipiracy Code Spreads Wildly
By Brad Stone, New York Times, May 3, 2007
Sophisticated Internet users have joined up to distribute a code used to prevent piracy of high-definition movies.

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The ConversionRater blog by Pat McCarthy is one of the best at keeping tabs on Web Analytics and “montization” from a non-Google-centric point of view. Pat’s discussions are geared toward web marketing professionals more than small business owners.

I will occasionally refer to his blog here in the McBuzz website. I’m mentioning this because yesterday Pat wrote about monitoring RSS feeds using a service called Clicky, and RSS is one thing McBuzz would like to expose readers to from the perspective of benefits for small business owners.

McBuzz (Mark McLaren) also maintains a blog for web professionals called the Web Marketing Pro Blog. The goal of the main website/blog at mcbuzz.com (the one you are reading right now) is to communicate with small business owners and others about ways to market their business effectively using a website, web optimized press releases, RSS feeds, and such, without getting into the gory technical details.

For gory technical details, discussion of web analytics tools like Google Analytics, coding techniques, etc., see the Web Marketing Pro Blog.

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