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Tag: seo tips and tricks

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Essential Small Business SEO Tips

Essential Small Business SEO Tips

Essential Small Business SEO Tips

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) can be an expensive endeavour for small business owners who choose to outsource this marketing function. However, there are some steps you can take to bring many of the elements in-house and reduce your agency or consultancy fees. These include:

Taking Control of Your Site Content

If you have a 5 page website, don’t expect to rank number one on highly competitive key phrases any time soon. Search engines love new content, so “flat” structured sites, featuring no deep content, rare updates, and poor internal linking structures will not perform well. The most successful sites on the web often feature thousands of pages, so you need to put in place a plan to develop your content on a weekly, or better still, daily basis.

Set Yourself Realistic Objectives

If you’re launching a new website about mortgages, don’t expect your site to rank on page one for the keyword “mortgages” in any short period of time. It can take many months for businesses with very large marketing budgets to achieve page one results on competitive terms such as this. Instead, try and identify your niche. What kind of mortgages are you offering? What age group of demographic are you targeting? Whereabouts are your customers based? These questions will help you to inform your keyword research.

Target the Long-Tail

The long-tail can be defined as those keywords which have low search volumes with high intent for sales. Targeting these keywords can be a very effective SEO strategy for small business owners. Long tail keywords are generally 4 or more words long. An example would be “mortgages for over 50s”. At the opposite end of the tail are your head keywords which are normally 1 or 2 keywords long. An example would be “mortgages”. Using keyword research tools to identify high intent, long-tail search terms will help you to define the right strategy for your niche.

Add as much Relevant Content as Possible

Keep generating lots of content featuring both your long-tail and head search terms. By doing so on a frequent basis you should secure page one results for your long-tail target keywords with 2 to 3 months (so long as your site is engineered efficiently and you combine this with other SEO work such as link-baiting or building). If your content is good quality, over time google will identify your site as an authority on your topic making it a likelier possibility for you to eventually rank on your head keywords. Remember, this requires consistency and can take months or possibly even years of content development work, dependent upon your budget.

Target Local Search

Use keyword tools such as Word Tracker, or try running a google AdWords campaign to identify the kinds of keywords people use to locate your products or services on a local level. If you run a locksmith in Haywards Heath, try targeting the terms “locksmith Haywards Heath” or “locksmiths in East Sussex”. You’re much more likely to achieve a result on these terms than you are on the generic term “locksmiths”.

Install a Blog on your Website

Blog publishing platforms such as Word Press are very search engine friendly and can be customised easily by adding SEO plug-ins. Blogging about your services is another great way to target the long-tail and once your blog is “trusted” by the search engines it’s not unusual for your posts to be indexed in a matter of minutes. This is because search engines love new content.

Install Analytics, Learn and Be Patient

Make sure you install google Analytics or other web analytics software. You need to keep a close eye on the bounce rate of your landing pages (where users visit your site and leave immediately). If your bounce rate is too high your landing page content is clearly low in relevance, credibility or quality and you need to do something about it. Sites with high bounce rates will not perform well in the search engines in the long term. Use web analytics to help you optimise your website performance and engage your site visitors. Use these tools to learn, keep implementing the necessary changes, be patient, and over time you will see improvements. The essence of effective small business SEO is to take control of your content and its performance.

#Essential #Small #Business #SEO #Tips

Source by James Michael Hubbard

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Link Building and How it Affects Your SEO

Link Building and How it Affects Your SEO

Link Building and How it Affects Your SEO

Article links are extremely important in the world of SEO or Search Engine optimisation. Articles with links going in and out of their page(s) rank higher in search engine results. It is highly advisable to have your articles linking to other people materials, as well as have them or completely different people link back to your articles as reference or authority – creating what is called link building. Read on to understand more about link building.

You have created your websites and want to start selling. Your website is great and you are confident it can do its selling job well. The question is how to get people to visit your website. People trying to find help, services and products on the Internet are most likely to do so by searching it on search engine sites like google or Yahoo!. Search engines index and pool together articles published on sites all over the internet based on keywords, domain age and links. Optimize these and chances of people clicking on your URL rise higher.

There is nothing much you can do about your domain age but you can write keyword rich articles, as well as improve link backs to your pages. If you don’t think writing is something you are good at, you can always outsource your text to a freelance writer who will write comprehensive, authoritative articles about your service or products.

Link building is something you can do on your own as long as you know the tips and tricks. One of the most important things to remember is the reasons you are on the Net in the first place. You want to sell, yes, but it is more important to remember that your customers want you to help them. Keep this in mind and your daunting, time draining task of link building is going to look that much easier.

Starting from that point of view, make sure that your content or articles are helpful to your potential customers. Remember, you are supposed to be an expert in your field. Write good content that is rich with information, shortcuts, tips and tricks to help your target audience solve their problems. Don’t worry about people using your knowledge for free, when they realize you are good they will come back with real problems you can monetize from.

Don’t hesitate to give credits where they are due. Place links to other articles written by well known authors or bloggers inside your article to make a point. This helps lend credibility to your articles as well as opening the doors to opportunity of a google.com/website?sl=ar&tl=en&hl=en&u=http://www.getmasstrafficnow.info”>link back. Authors and bloggers who are good are not afraid of competitors, they are constantly in search of people they can learn from and if you keep on producing well written content, there is a good chance they will link back to your articles.

Participating in the community is also another great way to ensure link building. Comment on a blog that is connected to your business niche and participate in a Twitter conversation where you may offer help. Again, if people think what you have to say is valuable, they will likely click on your link and see what you are all about. Build your links by linking to other people first!

#Link #Building #Affects #SEO

Source by Philip Howell

Posted on

SEO – Internal optimisation Of A Website

SEO - Internal Optimization Of A Website

SEO – Internal optimisation Of A Website

In search engine optimisation or SEO, both internal and external optimisation is important in achieving a favorable rank in search engines. Internal optimisation refers to those improvements that we can apply on your website and its content, appearance, accessibility, etc. External optimisation on the other hand refers to those techniques which you can use to enhance the visibility of our website in online media. In order to make sure that the website is frequently indexed by the search engines, you need to implement both internal and external optimisation techniques.

Here are few important internal optimisation techniques that you should follow:

1. Create quality content as it is a common saying that content is king. Quality content can go a long way in making the site very popular with the search engines.

2. Structure and design a web page in such a manner that it is functional, easy to access and captures the users’ attention.

3. Create unique titles and descriptions of relevant content on each page. Titles and descriptions are starting points for the identification of relevant terms by search engines.

4. Make your website as accessible as possible: limit Flash content, frames or JavaScript. Such content make it difficult for google Panda to trace or track information from different pages or sections of the site.

5. Create a site map in the coding of our website so that google Panda can easily detect and index its content. A site map helps in improving the visibility of the website which in turn assists in improving its ranking.

6. Improve the user experience with design improvements and try to reduce bounce rates. You may not know but Panda also gives important to the amount of time each visitor spends on a site. When the time spent is higher, the site is indexed more frequently.

7. Host the site in a reliable web server so that it is accessible at all times. If the site is not accessible most of the times, it will be ignored by google Panda and its ranking will be severely affected. Thus, it is important that you choose the services of a good web hosting company.

8. Use bold or italics to highlight the keywords in the site. When you do so, it becomes easier for Panda to understand the purpose of your site. It also becomes easier for the indexing software to match the website with relevant search queries.

#SEO #Internal #optimisation #Website

Source by Rajot Chakraborty

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SEO – Writing Articles and Publishing Them to Improve Page Rank

SEO - Writing Articles and Publishing Them to Improve Page Rank

SEO – Writing Articles and Publishing Them to Improve Page Rank

Search Engine optimisation is a great strategy to use if you want to achieve a good page rank value that will merit a high positive in search engine results. Aside from finding out and using keywords on your page to improve its search engine coverage, it is also important to spread your links around to give your page rank a boost to secure your placement in result pages.

One of the strategies used to propagate links on the World Wide Web is to create quality content or articles and embed links into it before publishing them online. Here are some tips on how to help you start on this project.

1. Quality Content Only

Creating articles to be published online as a link building strategy is not as easy as most people think. Aside from the fact that you have to know how to write articles that is understandable to a 5th grader, you have to make sure that the content you wrote make sense and is very useful or informative to readers on the Internet. Some would even hire or pay someone else to come up with quality content to be published on the Web.

If you want to make your own article as an SEO strategy to improve your page rank, you have to make sure that the content fits perfectly with the niche of your site. If your page is all about the real estate business, then come up with a topic and content that is all about real estate — or specific to the city or location that your business covers.

2. Double-Check For Errors

Aside from the quality content, you also need to make sure that you are not publishing sloppy work. Recheck and double check the grammar and spelling of your article to avoid making a fool out of yourself to your online readers. Even if you provide informative content that an individual will find useful, the idea of having quite a lot of wrong spelling and grammar issues doesn’t really exude a professional air.

3. Using Keywords

The article you publish online should also contain keywords that reflect the content on your site. The same rules apply here regarding the number of keywords that you can safely integrate on your content — enough to achieve search engine coverage without getting your site or content banned in the process.

google.com/website?sl=ar&tl=en&hl=en&u=http://7Seo.com”>http://7Seo.com/ — Search Engine optimisation

#SEO #Writing #Articles #Publishing #Improve #Page #Rank

Source by Vanessa A. Doctor

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Article Marketing And SEO Tips For Your Online Business

Article Marketing And SEO Tips For Your Online Business

Article Marketing And SEO Tips For Your Online Business

Article marketing and SEO are two great strategies which can be successfully used in any type of online business to drive organic traffic and generate laser targeted leads. In fact, if they are implemented together consistently your business for a couple of months your results will increase dramatically.

Today, I want to share with you more things about how article marketing and SEO work plus some practical steps to integrate them in your marketing efforts.

SEO is represented by all the adjustments you can make for a blog, website or a simple piece of content in order to be found and indexed by the major search engines: google, Yahoo, MSN, Bing etc.

There are two main types of optimisation:

-On page: all that can be done on a page to appear in the search results

-Off page: is nothing else that getting strong backlinks for your page and increase their rankings.

Article marketing is one of the best off page strategies! It involves writing optimized articles and submitting them to various article directories social media sites and so forth. The goal is to get as many backlinks to your blog from the authoritative websites. Thus, google and other search engines will give you more recognition and of course traffic.

However, there are people who write an article only for the search engines and ignore a vital element: people. Every piece of content you put on the Internet must be original and valuable! Stuffing an article only with SEO stuff will create a bad reputation among your readers!

Here are a few tips to combine article marketing and SEO harmoniously:

-Keyword research

Before you write anything, research for low competition keywords. These are actually solutions to the problems from your niche. Use professional tools to make a complete analysis and select long tailed keywords ( usually these have a good amount of global monthly searches and can bring you decent traffic).

-Focus on your blog

This is the central hub where you brand yourself, create a community and promote different products or services. Article marketing and SEO must be used to make your blog stronger! So, write a blog post first using the chosen keyword.

-After your blog post is published, write an original article which provides great information. Keep it short (around 500 words) and always related to your niche.

-Use the same keyword wisely

Instead of stuffing the article with keywords, try to maintain a good density (use it in the title, the first sentence, around three or four times in the body)

-Include in your resource box two links to your blog (one in the original post)

Try to avoid spamming here! The article offers certain solutions and the resource box must lead to additional information.

After your article is completed submit it to multiple article directories (Ezine Articles, Go Articles, Articles base and many more others), social networks, social bookmarking sites etc.

As a recommendation, don’t use article submission software. google doesn’t appreciate that and as a result, you will not rank for them.

With these guidelines, article marketing and SEO can work wonders for you now and in the long run as well.

#Article #Marketing #SEO #Tips #Online #Business

Source by Dascalul Radu

Posted on

Professional Link Building Services Vs On-Site SEO – Tips to Know What to Focus On

Professional Link Building Services Vs On-Site SEO - Tips to Know What to Focus On

Professional Link Building Services Vs On-Site SEO – Tips to Know What to Focus On

Search engine optimisation has gained much momentum in the last few years. With a plethora of websites coming into picture, search engines had to come up with strategic algorithms to identify the real deal of each site and place it in its deserving spot. On the part of the site developer, there are some optimisation techniques that can be carried out to improve the overall quality of the site. These techniques not only render the site user-friendlier, but will also improve the rank of the site from the search engine perspective. Among the many search engine optimisation techniques, link building is one of the most important sure-shot techniques.

Although it is not possible to incorporate all the SEO techniques into the site, some high-impact techniques can be introduced in the site, to improve its rank. Techniques like Meta tags, title tags and long tail keywords in the Meta tags will increase the chances of getting listed on the search engine in the top 10 results. These are essentially on page techniques that in common parlance concerns the content of the page and the words used in the content that will cause the web crawlers to list the site when someone searches based on the keyword.

Link building concerns the number of inbound links to and outbound links from the site. An increase in the number of links pointing to the web page will increase its credibility and boost the link traffic factor in the search ranking algorithm. It is interesting to note that on page SEO was the only SEO technique that was in vogue during the early days of internet, when the dot com world was much simpler, with simple search functionality and limited number of web pages. Keyword stuffing the web page to gain a spot in the search results was a practice that worked during that time, when search engines were at their infancy.

But today most of the on page SEO techniques have become outdated. google and others have devised ways and means to detect mindless keyword stuffing and the site gets penalized. Although concentrating on the on page SEO indeed makes the site more readable, optimized, it does not provide as effective a result as link building.

Search engines give a significant rating factor in the rank for link building because it exhibits a site’s authenticity. It helps build a link of legitimate sites which are safe for the user to browse. Although automated link building services provide opportunity to build multitude of links, search engines do notice the automated links that are intended to just shoot the rank up for the page.

#Professional #Link #Building #Services #OnSite #SEO #Tips #Focus

Source by Bob D Williams

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SEO Tips for Improved Houston Search Engine Rank

SEO Tips for Improved Houston Search Engine Rank

SEO Tips for Improved Houston Search Engine Rank

Use Header Tags

Header tags are used to specify headings within an article on a web page. For example, using H1, H2, and H3 header tags make it simple for readers to quickly skim your web pages for content that they want to read, rather than having to trudge through all of your content. In fact, most people will not read through all of your content if it isn’t simple to read. Online surfers have little patience and will leave a website that doesn’t quickly give them useful information in an easy-to-read format.

Bold and Italicize Keywords

Bolding keywords will make them stand out to readers so that they know right away what your web pages are focusing on. This is another way to keep people on your website for an extended period of time, helping them become more familiar with your business and website.

Use Title Tags

A page’s title tags tell people who are scouring search results on google, Yahoo!, and Live (formerly MSN) what your web page is all about. You should use a different title for every web page, and the title should always be written specifically for that web page. If possible, include the title of the article on the web page in the title tag. The title should be the primary keyword that the web page is focusing on, as well.

Write a Unique Description for Every Web Page

Since every web page is unique, they should each have their own unique description. Try to use your keyword one or two times in the description. Overstuffing the description with keywords will not likely improve your search rank.

Use Unique Keywords for Every Web Page

Each page should also have its own set of keywords. The primary keyword that a web page is focused on should be the first keyword in the list of keywords. This improves the keyword’s prominence, which is a very important factor in search engine optimisation.

Only Use 100% New, Unique Content

Content that is copied from another website is counted as duplicate content by search engines and will not be likely to improve your website’s search rank. Write your own unique content or hire an SEO firm to write optimized content for your website.

Make Your Website User-Friendly

The first two SEO tips in this article discussed how using header tags and bolding/italicizing keywords helped maintain your readers’ attention. These tips also improve your search engine rank because search engines look for these optimisation techniques because they want to deliver quality websites to their searchers.

There are many SEO tips that can improve your search engine rank, but your website is not likely to see the first page of a search engine for search terms that your visitors are actually using without the help of a Houston search engine optimisation firm. You may show up for second-rate search terms and what are called “long-tail keywords,” but the competitive keywords that targets markets actually use are often targeted by big-budget retailers and service companies.

#SEO #Tips #Improved #Houston #Search #Engine #Rank

Source by Andre Zayas

Posted on

How to Rank Higher in Google With My Top 5 SEO Tips

How to Rank Higher in Google With My Top 5 SEO Tips

How to Rank Higher in google With My Top 5 SEO Tips

If you’ve stumbled upon this article, chances are pretty good that you want to rank higher in the search engines, and particularly, how to rank higher in google, Yahoo, and Bing. Well, here’s the good news first: you can!

But of course, every piece of good news comes with a downside, and that is the following: reaching a #1 ranking in google takes a lot of time, a lot of work and there are no shortcuts (sorry!). There aren’t even many “SEO secrets” that aren’t already known by most webmasters. However, there are 5 very straightforward SEO tips I can give you, a webmaster, if you’re looking to increase your search engine exposure and reach the first page of google‘s SERPs (Search Engine Results Page):

1) Title Tags. If you asked me, “What is the easiest, quickest way to improve my google ranking, I’d say it’s optimizing your title tag. Your title tag is the title of the webpage you want a higher rank for. The title for the page you’re on right now is probably something like, “How to Rank Higher in google with my Top 5 SEO Tips.”

If you are trying to rank a site that is about Jungle Gyms, you probably want your title tag to be something like, “Jungle Gyms – Safety and Maintenance” or if you’re looking to sell Jungle Gyms, maybe something like, “Buy Jungle Gyms at Discount Cost.” You get the idea.

Here’s the summary: figure out what your potential readers/customers will be searching for to find you, and make your title tag something very, very close to that. google thinks Title Tags are extremely important, and you should too.

2) Site content. Even if your title tags are optimized, the content of your site must closely match what your audience is searching for. If you’re selling Jungle Gyms but you don’t have the words “Jungle Gyms” anywhere on your site, google will think your site is about something else, and it won’t show your site to people who search for “Jungle Gyms.” Especially important is to put your target keywords in your header tags (H1, H2, etc.), as google sees these as especially important pieces of content on your site.

3). Inner linking. Try as much as you can to link to all the pages on your site, within your site. For example, if you have a page on your site that is about Jungle Gym safety, include a sentence on that page about Jungle Gym maintenance, and link your readers to that page, as well. Not only does this help readers navigate through your site, but it helps google spiders crawl your site, and this helps your sites get ranked. Also, make sure to include the proper anchor text. So, do not include a link that says “Click here,” or else google will think your site is about “clicking here.” Make your anchor text something like “Jungle Gym maintenance.”

4) Anchor-text optimized backlinks. Speaking of backlinks, you’re going to need them. A lot of them. Backlinks are the single most important factor to SEO. If you do not have high quality, anchor-text relevant backlinks, you’re never going to reach the top of google‘s SERPs. Aside from having a great website that other webmasters will link to naturally, the best way to get high quality backlinks is to create them yourself.

You can get backlinks from article directories like this one, you can post in forums with your site in your signature, you can post in blogs, you can submit your site to various online directories, and much more. Spend the majority of your time bolstering your backlink profile (and invest in SEO software, if you must), because that is what google looks to when they want to decide if your site is legitimate or not.

5) Patience, patience, patience. This is probably the best tip I can give you. 99.9% of site owners try to understand SEO and eventually quit, because ranking their site took too long. It’s a cliche, but it’s true: Search Engine optimisation is a marathon, not a sprint. You won’t rank #1 overnight. It never happens. Ever. You’ll need persistence above all, and with the right SEO tools, SEO training, and SEO strategies like the ones I’ve given you above, you too can be one of those at the top.

#Rank #Higher #google #Top #SEO #Tips

google-With-My-Top-5-SEO-Tips&id=5958037″>Source by Brandon E Baker

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Top 5 Essential SEO Tips and Techniques

Top 5 Essential SEO Tips and Techniques

Top 5 Essential SEO Tips and Techniques

Search Engine optimisation is the most in thing among big and small businesses and considered to be the hot topic on the World Wide Web. Not just because everybody wants to reach the top page of major search engines but because it brings more traffic, better sales and makes a better goodwill of the company on global platform. This article states a list of top 5 essential SEO tips and techniques that if used appropriately can do wonders to your site.

Build a great web site- Make SEO-friendly URLs

Search engine optimisation is often considered as the after activity but the fact is – the earlier you use SEO the better its results are. An attractive website is the best way to succeed on the major search engines. Make sure to choose a URL that is SEO friendly, design a website that is both search engine and user friendly. Use proper keywords in your URLs and file names but do not overdo it.

Do keyword research at the start of the project

No matter how much keyword research and SEO you do when your business and website becomes old, it can never give the kind of result the SEO and keyword research in the beginning can provide. If you are on a tight budget and cannot consult seo experts use free versions such as word tracker or AdWords Keyword Tool.

Open up a PPC account

Whether it is Yahoo search marketing, google AdWords or something else, opening a PPC account is the best way to get actual search volume for your keywords. PPC, even if it costs money, is the best way to reach the top page and get instant visibility.

Use a unique and relevant title and meta description on every page

The title of the page is the single most important on-page SEO factor. Also a meta tag description on every page is must, a Meta Tag description might not help you rank, but it will surely appear as the text snippet below your listing, that is why it must incorporate the relevant keywords and should be written so as to support searchers to click on your listing.

Write for users first- Create great, unique content

Even if you reach the top page of the google, but if your website is not user friendly you might loose all the attention soon. It is good to impress the search engines but ultimately the users and the visitors to your site are responsible to increase or decrease your business revenues. Design your site in a user friendly manner and make sure to create great and unique content so that the visitors are able to understand your services easily and appropriately.

#Top #Essential #SEO #Tips #Techniques

Source by Amit Kothiyaal

Posted on

XML Sitemaps

XML Sitemaps

XML Sitemaps

A Sitemap is the representation of the architecture of the website. It is an easy way for webmasters to inform visitors about the pages that are available on the website and how are they connected and what is the navigational structure whereas inform search engines about the pages on the website that are available for crawling.

Good sitemaps help humans to find what they are looking for and help search engines to orient themselves and manage their crawl activities. A sitemap gives the spider a rapid guide to the structure of your website and what has changed since last time. Sitemaps are particularly beneficial on websites:

o Where some areas are not accessible through the user interface

o Where webmasters use AJAX, Flash or RIA which is not processed by search engines.

History of Sitemap

1. google first introduced Sitemaps 0.84 in June 2005 so that web developers could publish lists of links from across their sites. Engineering Director Shivakumar on google blog posted, “We’re undertaking an experiment called google Sitemaps that will either fail miserably, or succeed beyond our wildest dreams, in making the web better for webmasters and users alike. It’s a beta “ecosystem” that may help webmasters with two current challenges: keeping google informed about all of your new web pages or updates, and increasing the coverage of your web pages in the google index. Initially, we plan to use the URL information webmasters supply to further improve the coverage and freshness of our index. Over time that will lead to our doing an even better job of delivering more search results from more websites.

This project doesn’t just pertain to google, either: we’re releasing it under the Attribution/Share Alike Creative Commons license so that other search engines can do a better job as well. Eventually we hope this will be supported natively in webservers (e.g. Apache, Lotus Notes, IIS). But to get you started, we offer Sitemap Generator, an open source client in Python to compute sitemaps for a few common use cases. Give it a whirl and give us your feedback.”

2. google, MSN and Yahoo announced joint support for the Sitemaps protocol in November 2006. The schema version was changed to “Sitemap 0.90”, but no other changes were made.

3. In April 2007, Ask and IBM announced support for Sitemaps. Also, google, Yahoo, MS announced auto-discovery for sitemaps through robots.txt.

XML Sitemap Format

The sitemap protocol consists of XML tags. All data values in a sitemap must be entity escaped (described below). The file itself must be UTF-8 encoded. The sitemap must:

1. Begin with tag and end with tag.

2. Specify the namespace within the tag.

3. Include a entry for each URL as a parent tag.

4. Include a child entry for each parent tag.

All other tags are optional and their usage may vary among search engines.

XML Tag Definitions

1. urlset – This tag is required. Encapsulates the file and references the current protocol standard.

2. url – This tag is required. Parent tag for each entry.

3. loc – This tag is required. It states the URL of the webpage. It must begin with a protocol (such as http) and end with a trailing slash. It must be less than 2048 characters.

4. lastmod – This tag is optional. It defines the date of last modification of the file. The date should be in W3C Datetime format.

5. changefreq – This tag is optional. It informs how frequently the page is likely to change. It provides general information to the search engines and do not compel them to crawl the page as it is changed. The valid values for it are:

o always

o hourly

o daily

o weekly

o monthly

o yearly

o never

6. priority – This tag is optional. It describes the priority of a URL relative to other URLs on the website. Its value ranges from 0 to 1. Describing priorities does not influence the rankings of URLs in the search engine result pages.

Entity Escaping

As described above, the sitemap must be UTF-8 encoded, any data values must use entity escape codes for the characters:

o Ampersand – &

o Single Quote – ‘

o Double Quote – ”

o Greater Than – >

o Less Than – Sitemap Index Files

There are two factors which have to be kept in mind when creating sitemap. They are:

1. The sitemap must not contain more than 50,000 URLs

2. It must not be larger than 10 MB.

We may compress the sitemap but it must not be more than 10 MB when uncompressed. If the condition arises that sitemap has more than 50,000 URLs, we must create multiple sitemap files. After creating multiple sitemaps we must then list each of them in sitemap index file. The sitemap index file must:

1. Not list more than 1,000 sitemaps

2. Not be larger than 10 MB

The sitemap index file must:

1. Begin with tag and end with sitemapindex > tag.

2. Include a entry for each sitemap as a parent tag.

3. Include a child entry for each parent tag.

The optional tag is also available for sitemap index file.

Sitemap File Location

The location of a sitemap determines the set of URLs that can be included in that sitemap. A sitemap file located at http://www.example.com/xyz/sitemap.xml can include any URLs starting with http://www.example.com but cannot include URLs starting with http://www.example.com/images/. Therefore, it is strongly recommended to place the sitemap file at the root directory of the web server i.e the sitemap file will be located at http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml.

The most important thing that must be kept into mind is that the sitemap file helps in indexing and not ranking of the website. It has been developed to help crawlers know about the URLs which are to be crawled on the website so that those pages can be indexed. It is in no way a help to boost the rankings of the website in the search engine results page.

#XML #Sitemaps

Source by Shailendra Sial

 

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