Unfortunately, we are still not able to show ads on our website. Our assumption is, that we first need to get the website properly indexed again by Google. In the meantime, we have created a few new coloring pages, especially the mandala style looks pretty cool. Thank you for the tipp with the mandalas, you know who you are. 🙂
We are also regularly checking traffic and it is interesting to see that we still get quite some traffic, through we are not so sure why. But more about that a bit later.
Sitemap
It’s interesting to play around with the webmaster tools. We figured out that most of our pages are not indexed yet. At the end, every single coloring picture we offer is having a unique URL, which we would like to see in Google and Bing!
How can we help the search engine to properly crawl our website? Turns out we can provide a sitemap and submit it to the web master tools.
Such a sitemap is an XML document and it should contain all the pages www.usmalbilder.ch offers. You can find the actual version here as an example: usmalbilder.ch/sitemap.xml
The file contains all URLs, and our hope is that this will help the search engines to finally index all our images.
As it would be a bit cumbersome to create and maintain this file manually, we integrated the generation into our build script. Everytime we build the website, the sitemap.xml gets created automatically.
After publishing the website, the only thing left was submitting the sitemap:
The screenshot above shows the Google interface. The Bing variant looks like a twin. 🙂 Unfortunately, the pages are still not properly indexed, so we have to wait…..
When the pages are properly indexed, we will try it again with AdSense. It will also be interesting to see, what the effect on the overall traffic will be.
More SEO
The Bing webmaster tools provide an SEO report with useful ideas on how to improve our website.
These are two low hanging fruits, which we will fix right away:
- shorten the website description
- use an h1 tag for the title of each individual image
- in addition, it is most likely a good idea to change the page description as well, for every individual image
Helmet!
If we want to have a dedicated description per coloring picture, we would somehow need to change the document head. For this, Helmet seems to be the library of choice to do that in a very simple way: GitHub – nfl/react-helmet: A document head manager for React
Wit this, we can simply return the document head we want with every component.
Let’s see if the most commonly used search engines will now better understand and index our website.