A clean and well organized sitemap is one of the most important SEO tools that you can employ at the launch of your new web design project. With a well developed sitemap.xml file, you will actually be pointing search engine crawlers to every page that you have included in your website. Without the file, pages that are not directly linked off of your front page could potentially be ignored and remain unlisted in the search engine results.
To build a successful site map, use the following steps:
1. Make a list of each page on your your website and its URL.
2. Assign each of the pages a priority ranking, which is a number between zero and one.
3. Make a note of when each page was last updated.
4. Assign an update frequency for each page. This could be daily, weekly, etc.
Once you have this information for your site, you are prepared to put together the site map file for your website. If you have created your website using a content management system, there is probably a site map generator plug-in that you can use to automatically generate this file for you. If not, consider using a professional web design firm to assist you with this project.
Christopher Bradley SEO Services, Web Design search engine optimization, seo, web design
The creation of a website should be viewed as a cooperative venture. The web designers bring to the table expertise in web design, knowledge of the latest html features, the ability to integrate whatever special features the client desires, techniques for search engine optimization, etc. At first blush, this may make it sound as if the web design company needs no help, such that the client may feel that they should just stay out of the way.
Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s your website and your content that are going to be on display and no one knows better than you which items are most important. That’s why it is critical to spend some serious time organizing your website content in advance. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it should be as complete as possible. It will ensure that your web designers have a clear picture of what you want to say before they begin work. This will allow them to structure the web design in a manner that is best suited to getting your message across. When websites are built in this manner, everyone wins: the client as well as the web design company.
Christopher Bradley Web Design atlanta web designer, full service web design companies, search engine optimization, web design, web design best practices, web design guidelines, web design usability, web designers, web strategy
Many websites will link to your website if you pay them for the link. Is this a good method to increase the link popularity of your website, or can you get in trouble if you use paid links?
Google is very clear about paid links. They don’t like them. Google even has an official form that enables webmasters to report paid links to Google:
“Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it.
Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site’s value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.
However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”
Christopher Bradley SEO Services Google, search engine optimization, seo