If you would like to find out if a page or document on your website has been indexed by Google, use the query modifier “site:url” like you would to see how many pages on your site have been indexed (and which ones), but instead of using “site:mcbuzz.com”, for example, use “site:mcbuzz.com/wordpress/what-is-wordpress” or whatever the entire URL or file name is that you want to check.

In other words, say I have a PDF on my site called “mcbuzz-wordpress-tutorials.pdf” (which I don’t - this is just an example). I can do a search using Google for “site:mcbuzz.com/pdf/mcbuzz-wordpress-tutorials.pdf” and Google will tell me whether is has this file in its index or not. Remember to use the entire path or URL for the page or document. If you keep your PDFs in a directory on your site called “pdf”, then you need to include that in the URL as shown in this example. (If you have quesitons about this, send me a comment.)

This post follows along the same lines as an earlier one called “Are PDF Files Indexed by Google?” But I also wanted to talk about this topic for a couple of reasons related to Search Engine Optimization and WordPress.

1. In WordPress, it is possible to specify the URL of a page or post — independent of the title you give the page or post — using the “Page Slug” / “Post Slug” feature. If you don’t specify a slug, WordPress will make one automatically using “Permalinks“. I told WordPress to give this post the URL “mcbuzz.com/2008/document-webpage-indexed-by-google”. If I hadn’t done so, WordPress would have called it “mcbuzz.com/2008/how-to-see-if-a-page-or-document-on-your-website-has-been-indexed-by-google”. Shorter is better as long as the relevant keywords are included in a URL, so I made it shorter by tweaking it a bit and removing words I don’t think are as relevant for SEO as the ones I kept.

2. Google is indexing pages and posts very quickly these days, sometimes in under an hour. The post you are reading right now was indexed in less than 7 minutes. If you have a URL indexed by Google, you may not want to change it because if you change it, the link to the page that’s in Google’s index will be broken. Someone might find your page or post by doing a Google search, but when they click on the listing, they will get a “Page not found” error from your site.

So, if you want to use the Page Slug / Post Slug feature in WordPress to customize your URLs, do so before or shortly after you publish a page or post. If you are thinking of changing a URL, you can check to see if your page has already been indexed before you change it.

If it has been indexed, you need to weigh the possible long-term SEO benefit of changing the URL so that it is more likely to show up on page 1 or 2 of Google for your target keywords — because Google will eventually re-index it. But if it has been indexed already and you want people to find it for some searches right away (in the next week or two, say) then you are probably better off leaving well enough alone.

Here’s an update to this post. News flash: That last paragraph applies only to WordPress.com-hosted websites and blogs. If your site is hosted by a third party rather than WordPress.com, and you are comfortable enough with WordPress to be able to download, install and activate a WordPress plugin (or you know someone who can help you do so), then you don’t need to worry about whether a post or page has already been indexed by Google or not. You can use a WordPress plugin called “Redirection” to redirect someone to the new URL when they request your page or post using the old URL.

In other words, say you create a post called My New Post with the URL http://www.example.com/my-new-post/. It gets indexed by Google in 30 minutes or whatever. Then you realize, Oops!, I should have named that post My New Post About WordPress, because it’s about WordPress! And you really should include “wordpress” in the URL to make the URL more search engine friendly, i.e., to let search engines know that the post really is about WordPress. One of the absolute best ways to do that is to put your keyword — in this case “wordpress” — in the URL. So go ahead, rename your post and either create a new post slug yourself or let WordPress do it for you.

Now your new URL can be http://www.example.com/my-new-post-about-wordpress/ (or whatever you want to make it using the Page Slug /Post Slug feature in the editing window). If someone finds your post using Google, and Google is still using the old URL, that person will click on the link and when their web browser asks your host’s server for the page at http://www.example.com/my-new-post/ , the server will know that they really want the page at the new URL http://www.example.com/my-new-post-about-wordpress/ and it will redirect them there. The fact that you changed the post title and the URL will not keep people from being able to find the page. Pretty cool.

Now for this to work, you have to know how to install the Redirection plugin, and how to set it so that it does what you want. And you also have to be using permalinks. (Read more about WordPress permalinks here.) I just installed the plugin on mcbuzz.com, at it’s one of the easier plugins to use. Just follow the directions in the readme.txt file that comes with the plugin. You can set it to create redirections automatically when a post slug changes, or you can do it yourself manually when a post or page slug changes.

Confused? Just send me a comment using the form below.

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Mark McLaren of McBuzz Communications has finished a series of tutorials for WordPress users. These WordPress tutorials are available on a McBuzz website called “Business Blogging 101″. They are also available on the McBuzz YouTube Channel, YouTube.com/mcbuzzvideo

Here’s one sample, called How to Edit a WordPress Page. You can watch it here on the McBuzz website by clicking on the arrow below, or click on this How to Edit a WordPress Page link to watch it on the McBuzz YouTube Channel, where you can see all of the McBuzz WordPress tutorials available.

How To Edit A WordPress Page
Time: 6 minutes

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The McBuzz Communications website has two new WordPress Tutorials, and I would really appreciate your feedback. Are they clear? Can you make sense of the WordPress editing interface? Do the steps in each tutorial make sense?

Links to the tutorials can be found in the sidebar on the right of each page, and also on the McBuzz.com WordPress page.

They are How to Make a Text Link Using WordPress

and

How to Upload and Link to a PDF, Microsoft Word, Excel or Other Document Using WordPress.

McBuzz is also testing a new medium for tutorials, namely, video. That’s right, McBuzz has gone viral! You can find a beta tutorial called “Howto Edit a WordPress Webpage” on mcbuzz.wordpress.com.

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What is WordPress?
WordPress is a free software program anyone can use to create and maintain a website or blog. To use it, all you need is a web browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox. Originally intended as an easy way to set up a blog, today WordPress’s improved capabilities make it a very good option for small (and medium-sized) business websites…. [Continue reading What is WordPress?]

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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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