Seo - What is XML Sitemap?

What is an XML Sitemap?

An XML sitemap is a quite easy XML file that contains information regarding one or more URLs on your Web site. The information that is stored there helps search engines better spider your website. All it requests to be is a list of URLs for your Web site, but to get more out of it, you want to take account of other information as well.

Dynamic Google XML Sitemap generator

SiteMap generator is an dynamic .net based sitemap generator.It crawls your website to generate an xml sitemap.It contains a range of configurable variables for definig the sitemap content.for getting sitemap of your site.The Sitemaps protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are accessible for crawling. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include extra information about each URL: when it was last updated, how frequently it changes, and how vital it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more cleverly. Sitemaps are a URL addition protocol and match robots.txt, a URL exclusion protocol.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo united to support sitemaps, a standardized method of submitting web pages through feeds to the search engines. Today, the three are now joined by Ask.com in supporting the system and an extension of it called autodiscovery. This is where the major search engines will automatically locate your sitemaps file if the location is listed in a robots.txt file. Announcements are up from Google and Ask now Yahoo and Microsoft.

Information on how to create sitemaps files can be found at the Sitemaps.org site. Aside from the sitemaps XML formal, you can also provide RSS 2.0 or Atom 0.3 or 1.0 feeds. That’s handy for those with blogs that already generate these feeds.

Sitemaps XML files too complicated? Don’t run a blog? Note that the site has newly expanded information on how you can submit a simple list of URLs in a text file.

In the past, if you created a sitemaps file, you then had to manually tell the search engines where to find it. With today’s announcement, search engines will check your robots.txt file for a link to a sitemaps file, then get the file from that location. This is a big plus because all the major search engines regularly check robots.txt files as part of their ordinary crawling.

Sitemap: LOCATION-OF-SITEMAPS-FILE

Replace the LOCATION-OF-SITEMAPS-FILE with the actual location. For example, if you ran a site at mywonderfulsite.com and had a sitemaps file called allmypages.xml in your top level, the reference would be like this:

Sitemap: http://adsenseco.blogspot.com/allmypages.xml

Have more than one sitemaps file? Ideally, you’d create a special "sitemaps index" file that links to all of them, then put a link to the sitemaps index file in your robots.txt file. If that sounds like too much work, you can have more than one sitemaps URL listed in the robots.txt file.

Aside from autodiscovery, you can also ping Google and Yahoo with the location of your file. The Sitemaps.org site has more instructions on this in general. For specifics:

Google: See here. Note that this pinging is different than the pinging Google also supportsfor blog search.

Yahoo: See here and here. Unlike Google, the same pinging system is used for both web and blog search, to my understanding.

Both Google and Yahoo also allow you to manually submit sitemaps files. In both cases, doing this via their Google Webmaster Central or Yahoo Site Explorer systems gives you access to specialized monitoring and reporting tools or information on how they crawl you.

Quote : Searchengineland

Posted on 12:23 AM / 0 comments / Read More

Why SEO Websites?

Getting to the top of the rankings for search results can be quite a challenge for existing website owners. But if you haven’t yet got a website and want to dominate the Search Engines as soon as possible, then it’s best to build your site from the ground up based on SEO principles.

"If you’ve got your own favorite web designer and they are happy to produce the website for you, then investing in SEO will assist you to get your site built the right way."

Building your website without SEO is like owning a mobile phone but not connecting it to a network.

What’s involved in building SEO websites?

Building SEO Websites takes more time than building a normal website, because you need to fill in some necessary details in the META tags on your web page (like Title Tag, Website Description, Meta Keywords) as well as ensure that your website meets minimum on-page SEO factors (like H1/2/3 tags, Alt tags for pictures, keyword density checks, internal links to other pages on your site, and other factors.

It goes without saying that you can easily build (or have built) a flashy website to promote your business or product, but if you aren’t prepared to spend the time to design it from the ground up with SEO then all your efforts to attract the Search Engines will be worthless.

Building your website using SEO techniques will give you the best chance to improve your search engine rankings at a later date, if you choose to employ off-page SEO techniques to drive traffic to your site. Importantly, you need to match the keyword terms that are used in off-page SEO to the pages that you are using for on-page SEO. If you don’t do that, then there is a real chance that your SEO efforts will be worth very little, and it may take extra optimisation strategies and techniques (and cost!)

The Primary Benefit of SEO Websites

If you don’t want to attract Search Engine based traffic then there’s no need to spend any time doing SEO; it’s only of benefit if you want to get traffic to your site from the Search Engines.

There are some website applications that don’t require SEO – for instance if you are building a community based website, or want to drive traffic using offline methods like television, radio, magazines or billboards, then you won’t need to spend any time optimising your website for the search engines. In these cases you would spend more detail on the site look and fell rather than digging into the depths of SEO.

References : Digitalpoint

Posted on 7:44 AM / 1 comments / Read More

SEO Scams

The whole search engine optimization industry is still affectively in its infancy. To begin with, SEO has been around only since about late 1996, early 1997.

This lays to bed the claims of a lot of companies that they have been in the business for years. It simply isn't feasible for someone to claim they have been performing search engine consultancy for 15 years or more, and if they have, then the stuff they were working on 15 years ago is a totally different kettle of fish to what we have today.

This cost of entry to this industry is so cheap that the skill levels of a lot of the "SEO Specialists" is questionable at best, and their offerings may as well be classed as an SEO Scam due to them even pretending to be able to provide a service.

Unfortunately, there are a growing number of bad SEO companies and SEO scams that prey upon naive site owners. Before you consult with an SEO company protect yourself from falling prey to an SEO scam artist and educate yourself first.

If you're in the market for either advice or a consultant to perform SEO on your website then there are some very easy things to do that could save you a lot of grief later.

Don't be afraid to ask some questions!

If they can't respond to you in the language of your website perfectly, then they probably won't be able to optimize the site for customers to read it properly. Bad English on my site is allowed (it's my site!) but if I'm looking at a professional site, this turns me off right away. I don't doubt that this will be the same for any language

Can they give examples of sites they have worked on in the past?

I'm not talking about having worked on a 3 million page massive site, but if they can't even point you to a personal website of their own, then what are they doing advertising their services? You are not paying them to train themselves on the job :P

What will they be doing and how will they do it?

While this is the bit that most people are scared off it's the most important.

Don't be worried about not understanding the jargon. SEO is the same as ANY technical field, in that half the jargon is there to make the engineers look clever. They aren't and it's all ABA (another bloody acronym). Don't trust anyone to perform anything on your site that they can't explain. It either means they don't actually fully understand what they will be doing or they will be performing some kind of bad SEO.

What sort of reports can you expect to get for your cash? With the number of free tools and utilities available in this market, they should get something that makes sense to you. When they send a report to you, make sure you understand what it actually means. If they can't tell you then they have just run your site through a reporting program for the look of it. You could have done that yourself.

Source from : seo-myths.com

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The History of SEO

By the late 1990s as the size of the Internet grew, search engines started appearing. There has always been a form of search engine, but up until now, they were aimed at techs and internet savvy people. Around this time, their use grew to include the "average Joe".

Search Engines received payment for their services through a new revenue steams like pay-per-click (PPC). By 2007, this medium was the main source of income for them.

SEO consultants appeared on the scene and helped businesses learn about use the new advertising markets offered by search engines, and new agencies focusing upon marketing and advertising through search engines emerged.

The term "Search Engine Marketing" was supposedly proposed by Danny Sullivan in 2001 to cover the activities involved in SEO, managing paid listings at the search engines, submitting sites to directories, this gives you a rough idea of the maturity of the SEO world.

Initially the focus was on the pay-per-click market, but it soon became clear that the main focus was to become the organic market. Organic SEO is the attempt to get the best rank in the search engines through two main areas:

On Page Optimization is what can be physically done on the pages of a website to maximize its performance in the search engines for target keywords related to the on-page content.

Off Page Optimization is what can be done outside of a website to increase its ranking in the search engines for target keywords related to the page content and keywords in the form of direct-links.

By 2006, SEM was fastest growing advertising medium.

In 2008, North America spent $13.5 billion on search engine marketing. The largest players in the SEM world are Google AdWords, Yahoo! and Microsoft's adCenter.

Because the internet in general and search engines in particular are relatively new indrustries (only 15-20 years old) is based around a complex technology and knowledge of its workings is not easily available (off the shelf), a secondary "search marketing agency" market has evolved. Many people do not understand the workings of SEM and choose to rely on third party's to control their Internet advertising. Therefore, this page us designed to give you a brief run down of the SEM basics and a little bit of the background on the industry.

Source from : seo-myths.com

Posted on 1:44 AM / 0 comments / Read More

What is SEO and SEM?

What is SEO ?

SEARCH ADVERTISING

In Internet Marketing, Search Advertising is placing adverts on Web pages that show results from search engine queries. Through the same system, adds can also be placed on Web pages. (An automatic search related to the original query)

These adds are targeted to match key search terms (called keywords) entered on search engines. This ability to target the search has contributed to the effectiveness of this medium to advertisers. Invariably people will use a search engine to identify and compare options immediately before making a decision on buying an item.

Thus presenting consumers with advertisements tailored to their immediate buying interests encourages consumers to click on search advertisements instead of unpaid search results, which are often less relevant. Unpaid search results are referred to as organic results.

PAY-PER-CLICK

Pay-Per-Click is a system where an advertiser pays an amount for each click someone makes on a link leading to their website.

This is also known as Cost-per-Click. The costs are dependent on keyword prices from the search engine, usually settled by an auction system.

KEYWORDS

A "keyword" is whatever you type in when you search on Google. Although you may type in more than one word when searching many people still call it a keyword as opposed to a "keyword phrase".

Search engines conduct auctions to sell adds according to bids received for keywords and relative relevance of user keywords to adds in the inventory.

The keyword "Cheap Cars" is more expensive than one that is in less demand, such as "yellow gravy."

Search engines build indexes of Web pages using a web Crawler (for example the Googlebot, or the MSNbot). When the publisher of a Web page allows adds to be served up on thier page, the search engine uses their index's to associate the content of that page with various keywords.

Advertising based on keywords in the content is called Contextual advertising.

Advertisers can choose whether to buy ads on search result pages (search advertising), published content pages (contextual advertising), or both. Bids on the same keywords are usually more expensive in search advertising than in contextual advertising.

What Is SEM?

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is different to Search Engine Optimisation in that it provides the website owner with more control over who they connect with and the results generated. SEM allows the website owner to define things such as geography, customer demographic and search terms used to find advertisements placed strategically on the internet that drive qualified leads to your website.

Source from : seo-myths.com, webforcefive.com.au

Posted on 1:38 AM / 0 comments / Read More

Google Adsense Secrets Revealed - Pats 13 Traffic Generation – SEO

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, plays an important role in advertising a website. This is how you get a higher listing in the search results, when keywords that are relevant to your website are searched for. The more optimized your site is, the higher it will be in the search engine results. 

This brings what is known as natural search traffic to your website. Natural search traffic means that someone found your site in the search engine results because it was naturally listed high enough for them to find it. You didn’t pay to get it listed higher.

There are two types of SEO: on site and offsite. Off site is the easiest to explain, and all it entails is getting inbound links to your site. This means that you get a link to your site listed on other people’s websites. 

However, they must be quality links for the search engines to pay any attention to them. You want to get your link on sites that are important. The search engine considers sites that have a high Google page rank, and a low Alexa rank important.

The more quality inbound links you get, the more important your own site becomes, as far as the search engines are concerned. Above all, do not use link farms, and avoid reciprocal linking (i.e exchange links). You can get your link on sites by participating in the forums with a signature file, or by commenting on blogs and such.

Another way to get more links is to participate in N-Way Link Exchange Services, that enables you to exchange links without having to go looking for webmasters willing to exchange links. These services does not do rely on or support reciprocal linking, but rather on 1-way linking, and 3-way linking schemes. 

I highly recommend getting all three of these services – I use them myself and without them you wouldn’t have found this free ebook on adsense… 1waylinks.net, 3waylinks.net, mywaylinks.net... and make sure to read all the testimonials - Awesome! 

When you are getting links on other sites, mix it up. Don’t just link to your main page all the time. Search engines become more interested when they see multiple sites linking to various pages on your site, instead of just the main one. Build inbound links slowly. Search engines become suspicious when you get too many inbound links too fast! 

There are numerous elements of on site SEO. First, you want very clean HTML code. Search engines don’t like messy code that contains numerous errors. Use an HTML code validator to check your code. Make sure to put javascript and style sheet code in separate include files.

Make sure that you use your keywords appropriately. First, you should have a keyword density of 2 to 3%. If there are 1200 words on the page, your keyword should appear 24 to 36 times in that content.

Use your keywords in all ‘alt’ tags. There are alt tags for images, tables, and links. Also use your keywords in the ‘title’ tag which is in the ‘head’ tag at the top of the code. Search engines love links. Remember this. Do some internal linking in your content, using text links.

When linking, avoid linking words like ‘here’ or ‘click here.’ This does nothing for SEO. Instead, for example if your keyword was weight loss, you might have a link that says ‘weight loss information for women over 40.’ Make sure that you put your keywords in bold letters, and use the H1 or H2 tags for your titles and subtitles, which should also contain your keywords.

Build a site map, upload it to your server, and link to it on all of your pages. Search engines love site maps. In fact, Google makes it easy to create a free site map that you can use for your site.

Do not use any hidden text. Do not spam your keywords. Use them in natural ways. Write natural sentences. Search engines are very hard to fool, and if you use ‘black hat’ SEO techniques, the search engine spiders will simply stop visiting, and your site won’t get listed!

Finally, do not use any content on your site that can be found elsewhere. All of your content must be original, or the search engine will view it as duplicate content, and ignore it.

Readmore : Google Adsense Secrets Revealed - Pats 14 Keys To Success

Posted on 5:36 AM / 0 comments / Read More