SEO Blog

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.

Webmaster Tools, just like a good analytics package, can help you to see your site through the eyes of a search engine. It won’t tell you when if your design is ugly or content is poor, but it will give you a heads up when errors start to creep in.

So, on the day that Bing released their revised Webmaster Tools programme, I thought it would be worth discussing some of the benefits for your site and SEO efforts.
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There have been rumours flying about Google Caffeine since it was first mooted late last year. Hearsay took over from facts pretty early on, giving Caffeine a reputation for being a potential SEO killer. Early evidence suggests it is anything but.

Finally rolled out on Tuesday [see: Our new search index: Caffeine | Official Google Blog] Caffeine is a new index system for the world’s most popular search engine. Rather than taking a month to index pages, Caffeine can get it done almost within days, hours and even minutes. It is designed to give new content a platform and remove older, less relevant results. This makes it far more relevant to news providers than it does to most general websites.

The one issue that might come into practice is the fact that stronger sites who regularly update content will be indexed quicker. This is Google’s way of ensuring that authority sites are given priority. In the most part this shouldn’t cause you any undue hardship, particularly as your own pages should now be indexed far quicker than they were previously. Theoretically you could be leapfrogged by these sites when new content is released.
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