A quick search on Google for advice on creating a site map initially threw up many links to software you could buy or download for free to create a site map.
But why do you need a site map?
Basically as websites get larger and more complex both the human browser and the search engine spiders need an easy to follow map to find all the pages within your site. A site map gives them a simple navigational tool.
Site maps have 3 main benefits:
1) A site map allows visitors to easily find what they are looking for by simply visiting your site map and clicking on the link to go directly to the page they want to visit.
2) Often technologies employed to assist in reading webpages such as web page readers and screen readers can only follow text links. For practical reasons it may not always be possible to show a text link to every other page within your site on your main page and other pages within your website and so use a site map.
3) Search engine spiders like text and text links. If they cannot follow a text link to a page of your site it may not get indexed. Make it easy for the spider to index all your pages through a site map.
A site map consists of the two things search engines love - text and keywords. To build a good site map combine relevant keywords with a hyper text links. For example on your site map you may have a link to your webpage about website promotion so your hyperlink should contains the words 'website promotion' and link directly to that page within your site.
A site map does not need and indeed should not be fancy, but should be clear and easy to navigate.
Here are some tips for a good site map:
1. Place a prominent link to your site map on every page and lable it SITE MAP.
2. It should show all your webpages through different levels as basic text links.
3. Use standard colours for links and visited links.
4. It should show a quick, easy to follow over view of the site without the need to scroll around in the web browser.
Google started allowing people to submit site maps to their account as a way of letting google know about all your webpages and updates to your site. It does not increase your page ranking at all but is worth taking the time to set up properly.
You can find free software for creating site maps at:
http://www.likno.com/sitemap.html
http://www.freesitemapgenerator.com
http://www.sitemapspal.com
And when you are done, don't forget to tell Google about your site map so they can trawl and hopefully index all the pages of your site.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login
A well planned site map can ensure your Web site is fully indexed by search engines.
How to create a google site map
How To Become An SEO Ninja
Every website listed in the search engines has a position, or ‘ranking’, and each one of these rankings can change very quickly, in some cases as often as weekly or even daily. One day your website’s in a good position, then the next you’re wondering what happened to it. Staying on top of this situation is a must for any SEO professional – you need to become a search engine ninja. If that’s what you want to do, then you need to keep these things in mind at all times:
1. Good SEO requires frequent updates and ranking checks.
You might have a good spot today, but all it takes is for a few new sites to open, and before you know it you’re back down at the bottom. If you pay attention to your rankings, then you have a shot at fixing things that go wrong before your rankings fall too far.
2. You should check all your links weekly to make sure they work.
Maintain high-quality, relevant reciprocal links and check them weekly to make sure they’re working. Remove any dead links, as search engine crawlers may mark you down if they find them on your site.
3. Tweak and assess your website on a daily basis.
You need to continually assess and tweak your listing to keep your site in its proper place – that is, at the top. This ensures that your site is in the best position possible, and helps you keep your competitive edge.
4. Maintain the content on your website.
Update your content weekly at the very least, to make sure that search engine crawlers come back frequently. Even the smallest changes will be picked up on by the search engines and will help to maintain your ranking. If you can’t write, find someone who can: you need content.
5. Keep up-to-date with the latest developments in SEO.
If you can’t decide what you should be doing or you don’t want to keep up with SEO on your own, you could consider hiring a specialist. Consulting with an SEO specialist will still allow you to make your own changes to your website and learn which things work best, but you’ll have someone to answer your questions if you need them.
You should review your SEO techniques at least every few months, to see how the algorithms have changed and to devise new plans and strategies for increasing your rankings based on those changes. Any SEO ninja will tell you that there are only really two major search engines that you need to worry about: Google and Yahoo. You can do well even if you only have the time or energy to focus on these two engines. Being an SEO ninja is hard work, but it can be very rewarding if you’ve got the dedication for it.
Beginning SEO for Young Websites
As websites age, they will naturally gain popularity. For the newly born websites, they are at a slight disadvantage. Fortunately, the SEO playing field is very fair amongst all competitors. Here are some things you can do to spice up the traffic and rankings.
Unique Content
Although I cannot promise anyone, it would make sense that this rule applies in the far future also. The quality of content will almost always have a decent if not huge impact on the ranking of your website. The amount of content matters, but even more so is the relevancy of the content on your website. For low cost ideas, try hiring ghost writers or college students. Some websites only have a message boards loaded with people using it to their advantage. These sites are very lucky to have other people generating content for them for free. Pages with only keywords and no real usable content will often get your website blacklisted. This doesn’t mean you have to be a master at writing to develop the content for your site. Not unless the search engines become so sophisticated later on.
Links
Having internal pages linked within your website is a good idea. Linking to other websites won’t help your ranking nearly as much as having other websites linking to yours. Some people try to build a community of sites, and have them linked to each other. Others submit their sites to online directories such as Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project. This helps your startup site a little bit but not nearly as well as it used to.
URL
Yes! The website address matters more than people think. I’m not talking about the domain name. The chunks of characters after the domain name often contain characters like “?” and “=” for dynamic pages. These characters are not supported by many major search engines and will create difficulty for spiders and bots to crawl through your website.
These are just a few tips to get most people started in marketing their site to the world. The work required is a never ending project since search engines keep updating with more complex search algorithms. When your site grows and surpasses your traffic and ranking expectations, remember, SEO takes more hard work than genius.
Advanced SEO Optimization Process
Given the razor-sharp competition in the internet marketing today, it takes the help of an intelligent SEO company India to beat the competition and sustain one’s India website rankings. Search engine optimization specialists can tell you how to improve your ranking in popular search engines which is crucial to boosting the volume of traffic to your website. An SEO marketing company would tell you that it is not enough if you rank higher only in a specific search engine. A comprehensive search engine optimization strategy comprises of techniques that ensure higher ranking in all popular search engines enhancing your chance to augment the volume of your online traffic.
So how to find the right SEO partnership to join the hands with for a holistic search engine optimization? If you are aiming at finding the right SEO services India from an experienced SEO company India to increase website rankings then there are a number of factors which you have to take into consideration.
We have a team of SEO experts India who understand the search engine dynamics inside out. Our SEO India Company consists of talented search engine optimization specialists who are immensely experienced to handle SEO campaigns for the most competitive keywords and key phrases in any specialized business domain. Being a leading SEO company India, we believe that succeeding in any SEO marketing campaign requires impeccable and in-depth keyword analysis which is the cornerstone of the entire SEO process and one of the most crucial factors in boosting your website rankings. Our search engine optimization specialists analyze keywords and keyword phrases using cutting-edge keyword analysis tools to arrive at the keywords and key phrases that are not only less competitive but also highly searchable on the web.
As a top-notch SEO services India provider we are renowned for offering SEO content writing services that will potentially boost your page rank. Our content writers bring their creativity and experience together to write keyword rich content with an amazingly assertive, appealing and marketing punch making the page a must-read for your classified audience. We know that content is the soul of any webpage and play a crucial role in getting you good search engine ranking in all popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.
Before you go for a full-fledged SEO campaign, don’t underestimate the importance of the right SEO partnership. The right kind of Seo Company India can make or break the very purpose of your SEO campaign. If not handled properly or if you choose the wrong SEO partnership, then you will stand to lose money as well as your precious time. On the top of it, you will end up subjecting your website to mal-optimization which again will add to your injury.
We adopt white-hat SEO techniques for better India website rankings. With us, you stand to gain standardized, customized and cost-effective SEO packages that meet all your needs. Here is a lowdown on what we offer in our SEO services India.
5 SEO Tasks You Should Do Every Day
There are five simple tasks that you need to do daily to keep your site on top. Here they are:
1. You need to start off by managing your links. This involves making sure that none of your current links are dead, and you should also check if there are any sites linking to you that you don’t know about. If your site consists of a large number of links you should make sure that they aren’t getting out of control and get rid of anything that is no longer relevant. Also make sure that your links are sufficiently labelled to reflect the page that they link to.
2. Re-order your links, putting the best ones first. And putting them into categories if you have a high number of links. If you have a links page with 25+ links it is a good idea to turn it into a directory of some sort. This can even help you in getting more links to your site in exchange for back links on the directory that you have created. Also check the sites that you link to and make sure that any back links that are due to you are still there as you don’t have much reason to keep a link if you aren’t getting the backlink that you deserve (if the back link was, indeed, negotiated when you placed the link onto your site).
3. Process link request emails. Whenever you receive requests for a link exchange, respond quickly. Not every mail you receive will be a good one, and you should make sure to check any site that wants you to link to it. If you are declining a link request let the web master know why. Perhaps you have an incite that they do not have. They may be able to fix a few things and then become excellent link partners in the future. It is common curtesy to inform the web master as to whether or not you are willing to exchange links within two or three days of receiving a request. Web masters will be even more impressed if you send them a personalized message regarding your approval or disapproval of the link exchange.
4. Check link exchange forums. This is a similar aspect to the above except that in this case it is more difficult to keep track of all of the people who can potentially request links from your site. There is a lot of spam on these sorts of things as well as many really terrible and useless sites. If you encounter such a site or forum member, inform them of your problem with what they are doing and report them to a moderator/administrator if they do not correct their behavior in a suitable manor. It is important that these kinds of forums be kept clean or a search engine may consider it a link farm more than an exchange service.
5. Finally, you should check each feature of your website, to make sure it’s still working properly. The dynamic content that you will probably include at some point must be delivered properly. Any messages that are generated on the fly must not be generated at misopportune times. The difference between a quality dynamic site and a subpar dynamic site is that in a quality dynamic site all content is delivered at the right time and everything seems static and planned out.
Take your time with your website and make sure that you do everything you can for it each day. Keep adding anything new that you find, because updating regularly will keep search engines coming back to spider more often. Updates are crucial and if you can follow the patterns here of insuring quality and precision, you will probably be able to come up with other ways that you can insure your visitors satisfaction and your increased traffic, link count, and search engine listings.
Never agree to link to someone’s site without asking for a link in exchange, unless they offer to pay you – even then, you should think twice. All your incoming and outgoing links need to be related to your site’s content for you to be ranked high in the search engines.
Basic Link Checks.
Some sites use robots.txt to stop search engines from indexing their links pages, in the mistaken belief that outbound links will count against them. To check, just retype their URL with robots.txt on the end (for example, http://www.website.com/robots.txt). If you see a page that says ‘Disallow’ and has the URL of their links page, then they’re not letting spiders index that page. Don’t exchange links with that site.
You should also check to see if the website is being ‘cloaked’, and report it to the search engines if it is. You don’t want to get involved with these people – better to have them banned and out of the way.
Does the site offering you a link have PageRank? Even if they do, you should look at how it drops between the front page and the links page. Be aware that new pages take a while to get ranked, so PR0 doesn’t necessarily mean a site that will never have any PageRank.
Take a look at how many links are on the page already. There shouldn’t be more than 20 links – if the site breaks this rule, don’t even consider it. Plenty of webmasters collect links, thinking they’re helping their rankings, but it just has the effect of making them look like link farms. Many of them don’t even involve linking to the big spam industries, like casinos and adult content. There’s no point in having a link from a site that takes links from just anyone.