In our last Internet marketing clinic session, a question came up about site maps.
There are two kinds of site maps, and they are both important tools to achieve better rankings for your site. One is a sitemap constructed as a page on your site. This is visible to the site users, and is a convenience for them, as well as a good tool for helping search engines to find the pages on your site. Because is is for site users, it should reflect some logical order to browsing your site.
When building it, you need to think about who is using your site and what they might be interested in seeing. You want to make it easy for them to find the information they are interested in. Because it is for readers, it may not include a link to every page on your site. That could become overwhelming for users and defeat an important purpose of the page. At the least, it should include a direct link to every major page on your site.
The second kind of sitemap is specifically for search engines, and the rules for it are different. It will definitely include a link to every page on your site, no matter how big your site is. For sites over 50,000 pages, this map has to be handled differently, but most sites for small businesses need not be concerned with this issue. A definition of sitemaps and good discussion of them is available on Wikipedia.
My class notes for the evening provide more information and a link to some software for creating a sitemap for your site.
This protocol for creating and using sitemaps goes back to 2006 and has been adopted by the top major search engines, so it provides excellent coverage and should not be overlooked by any webmaster! One important point to keep in mind is that you should set up a pointer to your sitemap in your “robots.txt” file, which all search engines look at. The sitemap won’t help you if the search engines don’t find it!
We talk a lot in our clinic about the importance of linking your site properly in order to improve your search engine rankings. When you set up your links, there are some details that can be important.
For example, create your links as “absolute” links, not relative links. What that means is that your link in your code should contain the complete address to the linked page, like “http://www.your-domain-name.com/page-name.html”, not something like “…/page-name.html”.
This makes your reference clear, and will get you link credit if someone “scrapes” your page. Little things like this do make a difference if you apply the rules persistently. You get a cumulative effect from doing things the right way that can really make a difference in how your site performs!
Also, always refer to pages on your site in the same way, that is, if you use “www” as part of your domain name, always use it. Don’t refer to your site sometimes with it and sometimes without. Those would count as different links and will not give you the same benefit.
February 22nd, 2010
admin
What a surprise! I picked up the phone (actually, I listened to my voice mail) and a perky voice says to me, “Hi, this is Sharon from Google!” I never heard of Google calling people before. I am just not on that kind of list.
What the call was about, as it turned out, is they are promoting their local business center. This is the place where you can enter information about your business so it will come up on Google Maps when people search for your products or services. I have had a listing for years and recommend it to anyone with a web site and any kind of local business. It is a free service from Google.
I guess the reason for the call is that they are offering enhancements to the listing that you can pay for and they are actually informing people of that by phone (seems a little retrograde to me, but, hey, whatever works!)
I went to the site (click here for Local Business Center information) and found some new features that I had not seen before. Most interesting to me was the statistics that they provide on your listing, so you can see how many impressions you have gotten and how many clicks from those impressions. This is all available on a dashboard where you see other sites that you may have entered, say, if you have multiple businesses, or have entered site information for companies you are supporting.
Anyway, this is good information and worth your time to review just to update yourself on how the whole thing works. If you don’t have a listing for your business yet, this is a great time to set one up. Remember your keywords when you set up your business description, because that is what it is all about. This is one more way to give your business an edge that others (like your competitors) are not so astute about.
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