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
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
Google has released an official statement about poor inbound links
Last month, Google published an official statement about low quality links in their webmaster blog. Here are the main statements:
- Linking is a significant factor in Google’s ranking algorithm but it is just one of many factors. Other factors are the content of your web pages, the site structure and the appearance of a keyword in the different web page elements.
- If you have a high quality website and get links from spammy websites, try to contact the website owners and ask them to remove their links. Google will not help you with that.
- It the webmasters of the spammy website are not cooperative, don’t worry and focus on the links that are under your control.
- Google recommends to optimize the many factors than influence indexing and ranking. The top 10 optimizer in our website optimization tool has been designed for exactly that task.
- It analyzes dozens of factors that influence the position of your website in the search results and it shows you what exactly you have to change so that Google will list your website on the first result page.
- Google says that low-quality links rarely stand the test of time and that they may not be considered by Google’s ranking algorithm.
- If you want to make sure Google knows about the spammy links and is valuing them appropriately, you can report them to Google with their spam report or paid links report forms.
Christopher Bradley SEO Services Google, search engine optimization, seo
