Google and Yahoo Site Maps

Let’s discuss a site map (sometimes called a site index). To start, let’s see what Wikipedia has to say about it.
“A site map (or sitemap) is a web page that lists the pages on a web site site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors, and search engine bots, to find pages on the site.
Site maps can improve search engine optimization of a site by making sure that all the pages can be found. This is especially important if a site uses Macromedia Flash or JavaScript menus that do not include HTML links.Site maps do have limitations. Most search engines will only follow a finite number of links from a page, so if a site is very large, additional strategies besides the site map may be required that search engines, and visitors, can access all content on the site.
While some developers argue that site index is a more appropriately used term to relay page function, web visitors are used to seeing each term and generally associate both as one in the same.”
The important topic is the one about search enginge bots (robots or spiders) that crawl your website. It is very important to make it as easy as possible for the spider to search your site. The easier it is for the spider, the more likely you will improve your ranking with the search engine.
Both Google and Yahoo have sitemap features associated with them. The requirements of each are a little different so if you maintain your site maps yourself, you will need to know about the differences. When you add a page to your site, you will need to update your site map and notify Google and Yahoo of the change so it can schedule a spider to come check your site for the new information.
You can also go to Google and log on to add your site map to their database. Once it is added, you can log in and see when your site was last checked by the spider and if the spider encountered any problems in crawling your site. This is just another of the many functions that you need to perform in order to have a first class website.
If you use Site Build It (SBI), it does this automatically each time that you add a page or modify a page to your SBI website. To get the process started. you do have to manually add the site to both Google and Yahoo, but SBI leads you through the procedure. SBI will handle the following updates or addition of with Google and Yahoo.
To read the Google explanation about site maps follow this link. https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html.
To log onto Yahoo and submit your site to the index, go to http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request.
There are some packages for developing and maintaining site maps. You can use Google or Yahoo to find some of these. I have not researched any of these so I will not make any recommendations.

Don’t forget to maintain your site map on your site and notify Google and Yahoo when you make changes or additions to your site.

Let’s take a look at what the site map looks like for Retirement Jobs Online.com. Click on the link http://www.retirement-jobs-online.com/gAe7FNB6.xml to see what is in the site map. It is basically a list of the pages in the website.

Here is an example of an entry in the Retirement Jobs Online.com site map.

&ltxmp&gt&lturl&gt&lt/xmp&gt
&ltxmp&gt&ltloc&gthttp://www.retirement-jobs-online.com/advanced-ebay-education.html&lt/loc&gt&lt/xmp&gt
&ltxmp&gt&ltlastmod&gt2006-07-01T16:04:36-04:00&lt/lastmod&gt&lt/xmp&gt
&ltxmp&gt&ltpriority&gt0.5&lt/priority&gt&lt/xmp&gt
&ltxmp&gt&lt/url&gt&lt/xmp&gt

Author’s note: If you see the HTML tags xmp and /xmp these are added in this article to tell the browser not to consider what is between them as executable HTML, but rather, print it as text.

The site map is written in XML. The url tag starts the entry. The loc tags specify the URL for the page. The lastmod tags tell the date of the last change to the page. The priority tags specify the priority of this page relative to other pages on the same site. The value is a number between 0.0 and 1.0, where 0.0 is the lowest priority and 1.0 is the highest priority. The priority can affect the order that search engines select URLs to explore on your site. Since the priority is relative, it is only used to select between URLs within your own site; the priority of your pages will not be compared to the priority of pages on other sites. The /url ends the entry for this page.

Google has a free utility to help create site maps in its webmaster’s section. Go to Google for more information on how to submit your site. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769.

Importance of Backlinks for Your Website

SEO is a step forward for getting your site a better rank in search engine page listings. But, one certainly can’t ‘tame’ a popular search engine. Becoming relevant for the search engine searches is equivalent to getting relevant to your customers. There are numerous SEO tools and techniques, and many more are coming up. One of the important methods to become more relevant to your searchers and increase more traffic is through ‘Back Links’.

What are backlinks?

Backlinks are the clickable text that allows you to move from one website to another. The higher numbers of backlinks pointed to your website through other websites, is an indication of the popularity of your website. Keeping this logic in mind, the search engines also uses algorithms that checks on the number of backlinks that your website gets. And accordingly gives you the rank. However, not all the backlinks contributes for higher ranks. The backlinks, which especially comes from other higher ranking pages, (such as wikipedia, digg it, etc) carries much more weightage than hundred other backlinks that comes from lesser ranking webpages. But, however backlinks from other relevant websites are also of no lesser importance. Backlinks from these websites eventually adds up to your relevancy. It just gives an approximation to the search engines, about how informative and helpful your contents are for other websites. It is claimed by many SEO consultants that backlinks account for about 80% of a page’s ranking in the search engines, and the rest 20% being related to the content and format of your website. But to get these backlinks, you must have quality contents which ultimately should be helpful to others.

How to get these backlinks ?

Getting backlinks is done through link building process, which is a longer term process, and can’t be achieved overnight. It takes months or even years to get a backlink from some very popular website. To get the backlinks from worthy sites, you need to make your site worthy enough, at the first place.

Some of the ways to increase you link popularity, so as to get more useful backlinks, which eventually will give you higher ranks are, such as:

a.Article submission: Write articles which are relevant to the kind of services/products that your website has to offer. Submit those articles to some article directories along with your link which can be added in your resource box. So next time whenever someone finds your article very useful, they might possibly visit your site. And if they want to provide some more information to their visitors, they might refer your links to them for further information. First, you get a backlink, and on top of that you get lot many other visitors as well.

b.Reciprocal Linking: These kind of links are obtained when two web sites agree to link to each other. Reciprocal links helps to increase your website traffic, and also boost your ranks in search engine listings.

c.Directory Submission: It helps you to get some quality one way links to boost the page rank and it also helps in diverting relevant visitors to your website.

d.Press Release: This is a yet another platform of keeping people updated about what you are doing at the moment. The contents of any press release should not be misleading as it would tarnish the reputation of your website. This particularly helps in getting you niche visitors-people who would probably be interested in availing your services/products etc.

e.Ask associates for links or link exchanges.

Now, once you done with all the essentials to get backlinks, just wait and watch. But keep your contents updated. Your perseverance will eventually pay off in the long run, which all will add up to the further improvisation of your search engine rankings.