SEO Blog

Search engine rankings aren’t created by pure chance. Google and Bing have sophisticated algorithms designed to provide the most accurate and authoritative listings. The information is fed back to them by ‘spiders’, which are simply robots that quickly crawl a website looking for keyword relevance.

The combination of a domain’s authority and a page’s relevance is therefore critical to where it ends up in the rankings. However there are many other things that you need to do in order to the grease the wheels of indexing, particularly if you are a new site or generally have to wait weeks to have changes show up in Google.
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When you first start optimising a website you could be forgiven for thinking that your efforts were entirely in vain. More often than not you won’t see any noticeable changes in your online visibility for days, maybe even weeks.

However, the stronger your site becomes, the quicker this process will become.

Take an objective look at it for a moment. Google is good at tracking down new content, however it is already dealing with millions of other new pages on other sites each day. If your site is relatively fresh you might not even have slipped onto their radar yet. You might, for all intents and purposes, be invisible.
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In the old days you’d expect that the obvious answer to this was to continually submit your site to the search engines and you’d be away. Sadly not only was this not very time effective, it just wasn’t very effective full-stop.

Once Google got around to processing your request you were probably about ready to send another one. Now you can save yourself the bother.

Whilst you might still choose to submit your site at the outset, that is probably enough. There are far more effective way for you to get the attention of search engines today, the most effective being strong links and your Webmaster Tools Account. Let’s see how both work.
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As you know, a website is basically a maze of inter-connecting pages. Each page has a number of links coming in and going out. This is what adds the fluidity to a user’s pathway through a website. It also helps search engine spiders to crawl through your site with greater efficiency.

Ensuring that each page is accessible to both users and spiders is vital to a site’s success. Reaching deeper pages can take time though, which may lead to indexing issues and visitors leaving. What’s the solution to this problem? A Sitemap of course.

Your site can benefit from two different types of Sitemap. Firstly there is the XML Sitemap which can be uploaded through the Webmaster Tools of any search engine. This will provide a mapping service for the spiders to crawl and should improve the rate at which your pages are indexed.

The second is a HTML Sitemap. This actually appears on the site itself and can be used by both search engine spiders and visitors to track down deep pages. Ideally this should be located in the footer of each page, thus ensuring that anybody can visit any page from any page with only two clicks.

But the Sitemap shouldn’t just be a vessel for transporting people from A to B, it has the potential for so much more.

As we have discussed previously, anchor text is a great way of providing added context to the destination page. So why not use the Sitemap as an opportunity to use your site’s keyword (most likely the title of each page) as the link.

Now don’t get carried away and start using nonsense terms for each page. That’ll just confuse visitors and look like spam. Just use the main term you’re targeting, usually your H1 header for each page, unless of course it is too long or inappropriate; in which case, just use the most relevant page phrase.

As intimated earlier, an XML sitemap can have a real impact on the speed with which pages can be crawled. Rather than just being able to do a couple of hundred in each hit, you could be looking at thousands instead. Of course, the more your site is indexed the better its chances of earning rankings – assuming of course the pages are all optimised. So the more pages you get indexed, the better your chances are of getting a shot at the top spot.

There are numerous Sitemap generators to help you with both the XML and HTML varieties. Of course you want to make sure that they stay up to date too, so make sure that however you create it you ensure you then don’t forget to update it. If you’re managing it through a CMS it should be automated, but it never harms you to check.

So there you have it, a Sitemap can provide a wealth of value to your website. Not only can you further optimise each page, improving links in and out, but you can also improve the speed and amount of pages crawled. All of which is good SEO.

Whilst we all want to create a website that creates an instant visual impact with visitors, it’s important that search engine rankings aren’t overlooked entirely. So if you create a site full of images and flash, it might look great to the human eye but it will be invisible to the search engines’ site crawlers.

Search engines aren’t human. They don’t judge a page on how nice it appears and they can’t scan through an entire site to see what information your flash files contain. They are blind to all of this.

The only content that a search engine spider can see is that which is included within the HTML coding of a page. Therefore on page copy, headers, links, Meta and tags are all visible, everything else is not.
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You’ve probably been on no end of sites that proudly display the W3C compliant badge. This means that their pages are free from HTML errors and meet the standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium.

Well la-di-da I hear you saying. So what if they have clean code, all it achieves is a small little badge that they can put at the bottom of the page – hardly a way of getting more traffic. To rip off another film, ‘we don’t need no stinking badges!’

Fair point, but being W3C compliant is far more than just a badge, it is a sign that you have a site that is clear from coding errors. Even the smallest HTML issue or unused Javascript can slow down your page load time. Just as concerning, search engine spiders won’t be able to crawl your pages as efficiently; this can lead to them misinterpreting your keywords and not indexing as many pages on your site.
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I won’t need to tell you how important content is to search engine rankings. As one of the two major factors, alongside links, content gives your site focus and it also provides vital contextualisation.

Whilst having content on every page of a site is ideal, it can become tired and worn over time. This is noticed not only by frequent visitors but by the search engines too. If there is nothing new on a site to index, the search engine spiders won’t visit. If you don’t get the search engine spiders crawling your pages, then what hope for improved rankings?

Of course you don’t want to be chopping and changing your content constantly. This would be impractical and wouldn’t necessarily have the desired result. But the occasional spruce up can always pay dividends.
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