SEO Basics - Part 2
Tue, Sep 9, 2008
Haven’t read Part 1 yet?
SEO Basics - Part 1
Sitemaps
It is important to have sitemaps both for your visitors and Googles benefit. The sitemap that your visitors see needs to be a heirarchical visual representation of your site purely so if stuck they can navigate to the page they want. Basically a page of links to all the other pages on your site. The sitemap set up for Google is a different matter entirely.
What is a Google Sitemap?
A Google Sitemap is a small XML file that sits on your server alongside your webpages. It allows Google to see how your site is structured, how importantly you rate indvidual pages and how often those pages are updated.
Why do you need one?
Google Sitemaps was released in 2005, and up until then getting the optimisation right for Google was just a guessing game, with the algorithms that they use to rank a site kept secret and no communication from Google to Webmasters (neither of which have changed!). Once a site was submitted, all there was left to do was to wait and hope. Once submitted a site might not resurface at all or certain pages might rank higher than others with no way of contacting Google and controlling the process or letting them know when a page had been updated.
With Sitemaps, Google have now given Webmasters a chance of supplying them with valuable information about their websites and also given Webmasters the ability to see what Google thinks about each website and what can be done to improve its standing.
Lets eleborate on that. Within the Sitemap XML code there is the ability to ‘rate’ pages on how popular you think they should be from 0.1 to 1.0. So if you think your home page is the most important page, you could rate it 1.0, with your product pages at 0.8 and your contact page at 0.2 for instance.
In return Google lets you know what the Googlebot (an automated program that lists pages in sites) has found, whether its a page or a troublesome broken link. Furthermore, a Google Sitemap account will let you know what words Google associates with your website, judging by what the Googlebot has seen on your site (useful for accurate optimisation) and a list of words that Googlebot has found linking to your site from elsewhere on the web.
Linking
Arguably the most important SEO element of them all.
Simply put (as simply put as you are going to get from me anyway!) the search engines have decided that if lots of other sites are linking to your site then your site must be good quality. Therefore your site gets a boost in its rankings.
Confused?… you will be
You may have heard of PageRank (PR). This is another Googleism and must not be confused with link popularity. PR only takes into consideration the QUANTITY and POPULARITY of links, whereby link popularity also takes into consideration the QUALITY of those links. Unfortunately the two have become confused and people often talk of one whilst meaning the other.
Most if not all of the search engines place importance on link popularity in their ranking algorithms. Links from directories with industry specific categories and links from other sites that contain the same keywords and keyphrases as you have, appear to be the main contributors to link popularity, whilst linking from pages and directories that have nothing to do with your industry or subject have no value at all.
To clarify
Alans Grocery Store has a link to Barrys Computer Hardware Shop. If that link uses keywords such as ‘computer hardware shop’ within its anchor text (the clickable bit) it will increase Barrys link popularity slightly for those keywords. But if that same link came from a source more closely related to computer hardware such a Claires Computers the link would be far more beneficial. Even better still would be a link from a directory of computer hardware stores where there are a collection of links all related to the same business.
Reciprocal Linking
Views differ on just how effective this strategy is. Some people still swear by the ‘I’ll link to you if you link to me’ way of thinking, other experts would say that this form of website promotion is now defunct. I’m not certain how effective it is. You certainly don’t need to reciprocate a link if you don’t have to. Remember its the incoming links that are the valuable ones. A link pointing away from your site can always have the effect of moving viewers somewhere else.
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September 14th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
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September 16th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
[...] for the simple fact that it will increase incoming links. As stated previously (see Links in SEO Basics Part 2) links from sources that contain lots of other relevant links are some of the most valuable to a [...]
October 2nd, 2008 at 3:31 am
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October 6th, 2008 at 11:55 am
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November 12th, 2008 at 11:47 am
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December 7th, 2008 at 7:22 am
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