We've added a new setting (accessible on the Admin > Site Info) page, to allow you to disable the Search Engine Sitemap. By default all our sites are SEO optimized, but in some cases, a client may not want the search engines to index the site (until they are ready). So this option will turn off the sitemap.xml data, which search engines use to provide a map of what pages to index. It will also add a meta tag that tells the search engine to go away for now and not index the site.

We just redid the structure of our website and wanted to make sure that all the friendly URLs matched the new structure. But when you change your friendly URL, any hard coded links to that page (on your site or from another site or in a search engine) will stop working and your visitors won't find that page that used to be located there.

So we've implemented a great automatic system that archives the old friendly URL, so that people are automatically redirected to the new URL. Whenever you change a friendly URL on a page, Gutensite creates a record in your Shortcuts list for that old URL and points it to the same page. That way, visitors won't get "Page Not Found" errors.

This new feature makes managing your site much easier, and makes it possibly to update your site structure with little hassle.

Eventually you will want to go through and change any broken links on your site and point them to the proper URL, and search engines will automatically update their links. And then you may want to remove those old archive links at some point (Admin > Tools > Shortcuts). Also if you decide you want to use the shortcut for some other page, you'll first have to delete the shortcut before you can use it on another page.

Small businesses and non-profit organizations often overlook the importance of branding and marketing. Usually this is due to a few factors:

• Small Budget: revenue is too small to pay for quality Branding/Marketing.
• Small Staff: no one is qualified to lead the marketing effort.
• No Time: staff is too busy with development, management and customer service to have time to spend on promotion.
• No Expertise: no one knows where to find a trustworthy, affordable, quality company to hire for help.
• Ignorance: lack of value for the importance of branding, marketing and a good website that serves your clients and reduces administrative overhead in the process.

When a business is small, it can sometimes rely on referral business alone. But as it grows, it needs a larger stream of customers to support it's growing infrastructure and it can no longer support itself without proper promotion. Usually it takes some sort of crisis for a business to realize it needs help.

read more...

“SEO” is a buzz term that gets thrown around a lot these days... it stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and refers to steps you can take to increase your website’s rankings on prominent search engines such as Google and Yahoo!. Companies everywhere (some trustworthy, some not) are trying to sell their SEO expertise. In general, we don’t trust most of their promises, but we do believe basic SEO practices are essential, which is why all our sites are built with these principles in mind. Our CMS offers fantastic control over the most important SEO settings. We recently wrote an article outlining the steps you should take to improve your SEO status. See the article at www.gutensite.com/support/knowledgebase/seo. If you are too busy, ask us to help.

Did you know your URL's could be more friendly? Some people call them SEO friendly, because human readable URLs that utilize keywords are "supposed" give a boost to your page's ranking. We don't know if that's true, but at the very least they make the page's address much easier to remember and less intimidating to send to a friend.

So instead of this blog being accessed at: http://www.gutensite.com/3311098

We've given it the Friendly URL: http://www.gutensite.com/blog/main

Doesn't that make you happier?

Well recently we've added this new feature standard for everyone. Try it out. Whenever a new page is created, you'll have the option of specifying a Friendly URL. If you don't feel like it, you can just leave it blank and the page will remain accessible by the ID, which is often fine. But in cases where you want to add a little extra flourish, or perhaps you regularly send the link to clients, consider a friendly URL. You can also rename all the standard page URLs by going to: "Edit Site" > "Settings" > "Page Settings": Then finding the page you want to edit and adding a SEO Friendly, Human Readable, URL.

Enjoy.