1. A Sitemap is a web page that provides an organised list of all the pages on a given site. The reason for doing this is making user navigation as easy as possible. Sites with many pages can sometimes be almost maze like in nature, with different routes available to get to any given page. A Sitemap counters this by providing a simple and hierarchical index of an entire website that can be used to find pages “deeper” within a site.
2.The second type of Sitemap is an XML Sitemap. This is a very important part of having your website rank high in the search engines, as it creates a concise index of all your pages in a format that is easily understandable by the search engine spiders(software robots that discover and index web pages). The more efficiently your site is crawled, the more benefit you will get each time it happens.
The WordPress software I use has the ability to create both types of Sitemap at a high level. This means that neither the spiders or potential customers will have any trouble discovering all of the pages on your site. Both of Web Design Wolverhampton’s own Sitemaps can be found by clicking the orange button in the bottom right corner of the homepage, view these for an example of how they will look on your own site.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) is a method of delivering updates from a particular website, notifying users about any changes that have taken place, i.e blog posts, news updates etc. RSS feeds are viewable in all of the major web browsers and can be subscribed to at the click of a button without having to divulge personal information such as an email address. By subscribing to many RSS feeds, a user can have all of their favorite websites summarised into one easily viewable stream of updates, changes and new additions. This allows them to keep track of all their favorite sites effortlessly.
Advantages of RSS
Aside from the user side advantages mentioned above, there are also advantages for the website publishing the feed. The main one being that the google spiders(the software robots that index web pages) value sites with RSS feeds higher than ones without, meaning new pages and posts appear much quicker in Google searches.
WordPress and RSS
Websites built using WordPress include an RSS feed as standard. This will notify subscribers of any new services, news, products etc that are on offer. Web Design Wolverhampton even has it’s own RSS feed that shows all new blog posts as well as any new websites and posts added to my portfolio, have a look by clicking the orange RSS logo in the bottom right corner of the homepage.
Does your website have any external links? An external link is a link to another site.
Why is this important? Google values your site on how many links it has incoming as positive votes, and outgoing links as negative votes. So the more sites that link in to you, the better. The less sites that you link out to, the better. Easier than it sounds because you must get people to link to you without a link back in return. (Methods of obtaining links is a subject for another post)
Most small sites I see have at least 3-5 external links. Most of these links are to associations they are members of, link directories, or sometimes external links just to be helpful to their visitors. (However, this has a negative effect on the site’s position in Google).
By adding a ‘no follow’ tag to these links, Google will not cast these outgoing links as negative votes, therefore making an improvement to your positioning with them. The ‘no follow’ tag is very easy to implement and can make huge difference on your placement in Google.
The ‘no follow’ link strategy is employed by most of the major websites including Ebay, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia etc. There’s no reason why small businesses shouldn’t employ the same inexpensive, yet highly effective tactics.
The majority of my sites I build are powered by WordPress. This allows the use of plug-ins (sorts of upgrades). I always include the SEO Smart Links plugin, this automatically adds the ‘no follow’ tag to any external links on my customers’ sites.
If you are not yet one of my customers and have any external links on your website. I can add the ‘no follow’ tags at a very reasonable price. Please use this contact form to get in touch.
How often is a particular search phrase used in Google? This is a good question, and one that you should be asking to form a good online marketing plan.
When looking for the frequency of the use of popular keywords and phrases, I use ‘Google Trends’. It’s free to use and it provides data that’s invaluable to online marketing.
Here are all the links you’ll need to use Google Trends;
