Are you using the sitemap.xml file in your websites? Google and other search engines now look for this file and use it to catalog your website.The Sitemap Protocol allows you to inform search engines about URLs on your websites that are available for crawling. It enables webmasters to include additional information about each URL (when it was last updated; how often it changes; how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.
Google says, “Sitemaps are particularly beneficial when users can’t reach all areas of a website through a browseable interface. (Generally, this is when users are unable to reach certain pages or regions of a site by following links). For example, any site where certain pages are only accessible via a search form would benefit from creating a Sitemap and submitting it to search engines.”
Using this protocol does not guarantee that your webpages will be included in search indexes. (Note that using this protocol will not influence the way your pages are ranked by Google.) With a sitemap, you can give each of your pages a priority between .1 and .9. Google uses this priority to break ties between two equal scoring pages on your site. This could be the difference between someone seeing your “thank you” page or your “home page”. Again, the value you assign does not effect the pagerank Google assigns to your pages.
Google does have a sitemap generator you can use by clicking sitemap generator.
Today, we’ll look at a YouTube video where USA TODAY’s Jefferson Graham interviews Google engineer Matt Cutts on how to get your site to the top of Google with 5 basic, common sense SEO tips.
Every day this week you will find a great SEO tip here on the Wharton Marketing blog.
Today’s tip:
Keywords – Use only one key phrase or no more than 2 -3 key words per page. A page that is well optimized for one key phrase is way more desirable and will rank better than a page that poorly optimized for several words.
Use between 200 – 500 words and use your key word or phrase in those words. Don’t force them in so that your content doesn’t make sense. Let them occur naturally. You are not just optimizing for search engines but for your viewers as well.
Research your keywords to see if they are being used by people in search engines. Use analytics to see what keywords were used to find your site in the past.
The wise use of keywords goes a long way in search engine optimization.
Just wanted to let you know about these upcoming seminars offered by the Arkansas Small Business & Technology Development Center (ASBTDC) this month. You can register for these seminars by clicking HERE. If you are in the North Central Arkansas area, you don’t want to miss these:
Arkansas Sales & Use Tax & Arkansas Business Incentives
Thursday, April 16, 2009
1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
665 Hwy 62 East
Mountain Home
Cost: $35
Seminar Highlights: This seminar is designed to inform business owners of current sales tax laws, help them prevent overpayment of sales tax, educate them about the increased audit risk they all face due to increased compliance audits anticipated in the future and to show them how to protect themselves from failure to comply with the new regulations. The seminar will also discuss State of Arkansas incentives and tax credits that are available to many eligible businesses.
Speaker: Jeff Simmons, David Rickman, Ted Walker – Arkansas Tax Associates
Cosponsor: First National Bank (FNBC); Liberty Bank of Arkansas; 1st Community National Bank; Baxter County Library; ASU-Mtn. Home; Norfork Chamber of Commerce; Mtn. Home Chamber of Commerce
Search Engine Optimization
Monday, April 20, 2009
1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
1600 South College Street
Mountain Home
Cost: $49
Seminar Highlights: Is your web site under performing? Would you like to dramatically increase online visitors and sales? Come attend Search Engine Optimization and learn how to optimize each page of your website to attract qualified customers seeking your product or service. You will learn how to find highly sought for search terms and where to place those terms to create a perfect page. You’ll also learn about free online tools for researching keywords and for tracking and analyzing your online customers. Don’t miss this opportunity to fine tune your website and turn it into the sales machine it was meant to be!
Speaker: Christi Wharton, Wharton Website Design & Marketing
Cosponsor: Mountain Home Chamber of Commerce; Wharton Marketing; Baxter County Library; Liberty Bank
This week, I have been writing key word rich content for landing pages. Do search engines care about key words? Well, that is up for debate, but search engines do care about content. What is in your key word meta tag, to me, is what indicates what the page is about.
When you are writing content, you need to have your keywords in mind. What is your page about? If you have a long laundry list of keywords, choose 2 or 3 and make a page just about those 2 or 3 (or less) things. That makes your page (your landing page) relevant for the 2 or 3 words that are used by people when they key them into search engines. If you are trying to write about 20 words on your page, you probably can’t really be relevant for all of them. A page about everything is a page about nothing.
Don’t try to be all things to all people, try to be what people want, when they want it.
Can you get good search engine results with a site built entirely in Flash? The bottom line is that a site built entirely in Flash still faces huge obstacles. While there have been recent moves from Google and Yahoo! to try to index the content from combined Flash/SEO sites, those moves have not yet translated into SEO results or success, when compared to html sites.
Google and Adobe have teamed up on an algorithm to index text content in Flash. As a result of the new algorithm for Flash, Googlebot now indexes “textual content in SWF files of all kinds” and extracts URLs embeded in Flash.” On July 1, 2008, Google rolled out another update designed to assist Googlebot in its ability to traverse simple JavaScript, like SWFObject
However, there are still major issues:
The URL generally never changes no matter where people navigate on the site. SEO practitioners will tell you, every page of your site is a potential entry page for a search engine. With a site built in Flash, SEO suffers even more as you only have one potential entry page, which is the main URL.
Currently, Google doesn’t seem to support translations of text content in Flash which means that if you decide that you want to use a rare and fancy font that must be displayed in graphic form (since the visitor may not have that particular font available on his or her computer while browsing), the engine will not read the text and therefore will not know what the page is about, which could harm SEO results.
Many mobile devices are currently incapable of displaying Flash content, although recent moves by Adobe to make “Flash Lite” available may change this. However, it remains to be seen whether people that are seeking information on a mobile device will even want to navigate through Flash, especially if they can get the information that they seek from a fast-loading html page.
This doesn’t mean you can’t use flash at all. A site that contains Flash elements along with the basic html elements can still be SEO friendly. Yes, Google reads Flash better than it used to but in SEO terms you want to make your site as spider friendly as possible.
See this SEO/Flash article by Brian Ussery for a great case study testing the use of Flash and the effect it has on SEO.
