Help: I can't find my site in google, help to create a sitemap

[edward-may]

Hi guys

I have had my website up for about 5months now and I don't seem to see my site anywhere on google.  How can I tell if the site has been index or not? And if so where can I find all this information so that I know where i need to make improvements in order to get at least 1 of my keywords in the top 50 for long tail keywords?  my website is zenory.com any tips or ideas how I can go about this.

Thanks and much appreicated

[DirkC]

Hi Justin,

To see if your site is indexed - try site:zenory.com -> this gives you the number of pages in the index (35 in your case).

In webmaster tools you can add the sitemap of your site - Google will indicate how many pages of the sitemap are indexed. I noticed that the /sitemap.xml for zenory.com only contains entries for the (identical?) sister site in New Zealand - you should have sitemaps for each of your domains. It's possible that these sitemaps exist already. You use hreflang - check here http://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights if you did everything according the rules.

Improvements - on the technical side - the images you use are quite heavy. For the blog / category pages you use rel next/rel previous - I would rather put these pages on noindex / follow as they have little added value for search.

Probably most important is the keyword research - which are the keywords you want to rank for, what is the volume that they represent, do you have the content that corresponds with these keywords. What are your competitors - what keywords do they rank for, ...etc. A  nice post on keyword research can be found here http://moz.com/blog/keyword-research-in-90-minutes - and there is off course the beginners guide http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

[edward-may]

Hi Dirk

Thanks for your response! This is awesome feedback!

I just noticed that we have the same site map for all 3 domains and I remember vaguely adding the same site map to all sites via google webmaster tools.  How can I go about generating a new site map for my com.au and .com site? And once iv generated the site maps can I re-submit the new ones to GWM?  I wasn't aware I had to generate one for each domain, so thank you for clarifying this for me.

If I'm adding new content pages everyday, for eg: I'm adding at least one blog post to my blog everyday, do I need to keep generating a new site map every time I create a new blog post? Or does this automatically update?

It looks like I have used the correct hreflang tags for each domain.

Thanks again for your feedback, looking forward to your resposne

[DirkC]

Hi Justin,

I assume you already validated webmaster tools for all three domains. Generating the sitemap: it depends a bit on the situation. I guess you have only 1 site (the .com.nz version) and that you point the .com & .com.au to this version. In that case, it's probably difficult to generate the xml for the other version via the CMS you are using. What you could do is, on a regular basis (e.g. once/week) copy the existing sitemap & do a simple find/replace of the .com.nz & then save the sitemap as sitemap_us.xml & sitemap_au.xml. In webmaster tools you delete for the .com & .com.au the current entry & replace it by the correct version.

The sitemap just helps google to find the url's on your site - so don't expect miracles from it, as Google is perfectly able to crawl your site & find all the url's.

On the longer term, it's probably better to create multiple versions of your site to fully adapt to local requirements (the prices are listed in NZD & I guess English in NZ is more related to British than to American English).

Hope this helps,

Dirk

[edward-may]

Hi Dirk

Lovely, thanks so much for your input!

Yes, we have all our sites in NZ Dollars due to the fact that our merchant bank doesn't process in multiple currencies so we had to display the NZD, I have no other idea on how I can display this differently, I thought maybe putting a currency converter somewhere on each page, wasn't too sure though how it would work. (I know my fellow competitor, they also use multiple domains for ranking in certain countries, and they have adapted to the local currencies but I found out the bank they use process for multiple currencies, which is hard to obtain in our industry as its regarded as high risk.  So we have had to settle for what we have as a start up for the time.

With regards to the site map - the SEO guys that were working on our site were only been paid for the co.nz site so the xml file he sent me was only meant for the co.nz, but I went and submitted the same sitemap for the com and com.au (me being a total amateur not knowing what I was doing at the time just went for it) so to understand this correctly, your suggesting to copy the existing sitemap for co.nz, do find and replace and then save the sitemap as com.au and com (not sure what you mean by that - how do i go about doing the find and replace?)

Thanks again for your recommendations

[DirkC]

Hi Justin,

Do you regenerate the sitemap on regular basis - I am a bit confused when you mention that the guys who made it send you the sitemap. Normally the sitemap should be updated every time you add a new url to the site.

What I meant with find/replace - if it's not possible to regenerate the sitemap for the .com & .com.au domain automatically (and if the sites are identical for the other countries) - you could always take the .com.nz sitemap (which is currently sitemap.xml)  - save it as sitemap_us.xml and then edit the file manually (can be done in a simple text editor:find zenory.com.nz - replace with zenory.com for us - idem for sitemap_au.xml - replace with zenory.com.au)

rgds,

Dirk

[edward-may]

Hi Dirk,

Sorry about the confusion, just to clarify - The sitemap for (co.nz) was generated by the SEO consultant I hired at the time, but this was only for the (co.nz) site.  He gave this to me to submit to GWT, however I went and submitted the same site map for (co.nz) for the .com and .com.au not realising the difference.  So, I'm trying to clean up the mess I made.

With regards to the updates, every time I add an article/blog post do I need to generate and submit a new sitemap?  I add blog posts on a daily basis to the site, but I have not been updating the sitemap since I first submitted the first one back in November.

[DirkC]

Hi Justin,

Your sitemap should contain all the url's of your site. Most CMS have a function that runs every night & regenerates the sitemap, so that it always contains the most up-to-date info. If you haven't updated the sitemap since launch it will not be up-to-date.

If your CMS doesn't offer this function, you could always use an external sitemap generator which crawls your site & generates the sitemap for you. If you google for sitemap generator you will certainly find some examples.

If you are using Screaming Frog, it can also this. If you're not using it yet - it could be a (small = 99GBP/yr) investment worth considering as it gives a complete check-up in terms of SEO. In your case - you should generate it for each of the domains.

rgds,

Dirk

[edward-may]

Thanks Dirk! This feedback has been very helpful! Appreciate your time and effort!