The Click Depot Blog

Archive for November, 2009

When you are considering SEO tactics, Sitemap is one that is great for websites that have dynamic content, pages with flash or AJAX, new WebPages without many links and has a lot of archived pages that aren’t linked at all, or very well. Basically, Sitemap is a graphical map of your website in one case, which helps customers navigate your website.  The other version is done using XML.

Google gathers information about your website content by using your Sitemap, so this can help with your search engine optimization, assuming you take advantage of optimizing keywords in your text links to your web pages. Your Sitemap provides text based links to your key pages and those can be easier keyword optimized.

The sitemap not only makes navigation easier for your website visitors, but it can also anchor certain pages to certain text links. For example, if you have you several pages you want to link to new products text link, you can link them through your sitemap.

Google recommends the maximum to be 100 text links per sitemap, to make it more search engine friendly, as well as visitor friendly. Certainly, larger websites should link their main pages, but sitemap is recommended for websites, no matter how large or small, it’s a matter of layering site maps for the very large websites, since a single sitemap is recommended for 100 pages or less.

You can find a multitude of free sitemap tools and ones that charge minimal fees, to help with your sitemap creation. These sitemap creation tools can help you build your own sitemap from scratch to optimize your website for the search engines. Sitemaps make it easy for the search engines to find and index all of your WebPages on your website by putting links to every page in one spot. It also helps the search engines to clearly understand what the website is about and what contents are on the pages.

Your sitemap should maximize keywords and contribute to keyword density on the pages. They should always be able to be linked to from your home page or index page because that is where the search engines will look for it. You want links that point to every page in your site and list descriptions so that visitors and the search engines can understand what they can expect to find on each page.

Many people might not realize the importance of sitemaps, when it comes to search engine optimization. While they are familiar with keywords, optimizing them in titles and text links are important, when it come to what the search engines will look for when searching for the content of your website. Through careful planning, not only will your sitemap be a great navigating tool for customers, but will be a part of keyword optimization for your search engine rankings.

If you are unsure how to create a SEO sitemap using the creation tools, most webmasters can do it quickly and easily for you. The important thing is that you take advantage of this tool, which can help move you up the search engine results.
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When it comes to ranking in Google News, the same criteria is not used as getting page rankings on Google searches. Page ranking is not as crucial in Google News because it is the nature of the stories themselves that carry higher clout. Fresh content that appeals to the widest audience can be more important.

When Google News crawls to find news articles, it will look in a few minutes and then will check again 12 hours later. It is unlikely that you will generate any backlinks in that amount of time, so they won’t be as helpful as on Google searches, for ranking purposes.

Google News ranks stories using two different criteria. They group stories together to figure out the ones with the widest appeal are going to rank higher than ones that have a limited audience. The ones that make it into this cluster of top stories are going to appear towards the top of Google News. From there, it ranks the articles by individual basis within the top story cluster, so the bigger your story, the more competition you will have in the story cluster for top spot.

Freshness, citations, local or personal Relevance and trusted sources are the criteria used to make it through this second ranking for Google News. The criteria are broken down using these remaining tests to see where your story should rank. To get ranking in Google News, there are 5 easy steps you can take.

1.     Make sure you story has wide appeal and will be interesting to a large audience. Even if you use keyword optimizing in a small news event, it won’t matter, when it comes to rankings with Google News. They are looking for the most newsworthy articles to appeal to a wider audience.
2.     Break the story quickly. Being the first to report a breaking story is more important that using too many citations with other links. While citations can be helpful, it is the freshness of the story that can make the difference, so publish as quickly as you can.
3.     Local or Personal relevance pertains to quoting local sources at the scene of the story. This gives your story more relevance than the stories that are reporting hearsay accounts. If you are quoting local sources or those close to the story, it will move you up in the ranking criteria.
4.     Trusted sources mean that you need sources for your story that are relevant to the subject matter, especially as it pertains to the country or location the story takes place. You wouldn’t want to cite a tabloid as a source for a breaking business news story, for example.
5.      When in doubt, check the Google News publisher FAQ page they posted a few months ago. It can answer many of the questions about how Google News works and these are answers that come from Google News, themselves. That is the best way to make sure that your stories fit into their guidelines.

To get the best ranking in Google News, make sure that your articles are newsworthy. That is the most important part of being part of the news. Like any other news source, people want stories that are the most interesting and offer news they haven’t already read about.

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To write attractive page titles for better click through rates, you need to write relevant titles that are attractive to the normal person and give a description (and unique Meta page title), that will make people want to click on it. The mistake that many people make when creating page titles is that they make them so SEO optimized that the average person has no idea what the website is about. As a result, they go to another one that fits better, even though it is lower in the page rankings.

The best idea is to keep in mind that your readers drive your rankings, so you want keyword optimized titles that provide useful information to the customers looking for you. Search engines look at the page titles based on relevance to the subject to determine rank. The Meta page title is what will be bookmarked by your customers and it is the title that will appear in the bookmarks list. You want to be sure the title is accurate and not missing or your readers will have a hard time finding your website later.

You want to be sure that your primary keyword is the first word in the title tag and then your corporate name should appear at the end of the page titles. There are a few exceptions to this rule, but you want the primary keyword as close to the beginning of the title as possible. Of course, when you are making home page titles, it should include your company’s name and include what will be on the page, or your website credibility can be lowered because the search engines won’t pick up what is being represented in the contents.

A few other pointers on attractive page titles are that the title shouldn’t be too long, the title matches the first paragraph content, and that the page titles are different for each page, but consistent with the rest of your website. Usually 5 to 9 word titles are best or under 80 characters in entirety. Avoid making the page titles obvious selling pages, but you want them to be compelling enough to be descriptive.

Another thing to be certain of is the titles are typed in proper title case and headers should use the right capitalization. The title of your pages should tell the reader what the page is about and the title should be able to stand alone, in other words, it should be more than a generic “about us” title. If you keep in mind the most likely terms that your customers are likely to type into search engines, you can have an idea of a good way to come up with your page titles.

Because you have to consider relevance to get the click through, you want to consider what the normal person is likely to type into the search engines and click on when looking through your pages and those of your competitors. Using your keywords, corporate name, and plain language makes it easier to understand your page titles and you will get better click through rates.

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Google has a way of penalizing certain web pages, if it thinks you are trying to manipulate page rankings. This can be especially true when you have pages that you change daily to keep them up to date. The dangerous thing about linking to penalized pages is that you will see your website or certain pages drop off the search engine results quickly or move down in rankings.

These penalized pages can be internal links or external links. Google assumes that you can control what pages are linked to your website, so they penalize you if you are linked to a penalized page. Be careful who you link to because you don’t want to be found guilty by association. If you have a page on your own website, you want to be sure it is not linked to multiple pages to keep several pages from becoming penalized. This can take some strategy to control, especially if it is a pertinent part of your website.

There are a few things to look for if you suspect a penalized page linking. If your webpage or website drops in the rankings and stays there, you might have a penalized page. Sometimes, penalties can be as small as 10 spots, but that can make a lot of difference in the web traffic you get. If you move down a notch, you will want to check and make sure you don’t drop any further in the page rankings, or you might have a penalized page linking.

Another thing you can look for is your pagerank bar. If a page on your website has a green page ranking bar that turns to gray, you will want to figure out why. If your page rank is 0 to 10 and you notice this color change, chances are you have a penalized page link, so you may have to alter your website and the links to attempt to regain higher page ranking.

Pay attention to the external and internal links on your website because a single page with linking that doesn’t fit the “no follow link attribute” that Google is looking for can cause your entire website to suffer. This can require diligence in deciding the external linking you want, but can get more complicated when it comes to internal linking, if it is one of your own pages.

Because page ranking in the search engines is important to driving traffic to your site, you don’t want to have penalized pages dragging you down the search engine results. You will want to stay on top of your page rankings and notice any drops or page rank bar color changes and then try to fix the penalized pages as quickly as possible.

You have to realize that the search engine spiders don’t actually read content in the conventional sense. They look for certain signs that page rankings are being manipulated and then try to isolate them. Unfortunately, it can take as much as a year for Google to “forgive” the penalized page links, so you may have to remove them for the quickest results. When it comes to your website’s page rankings, this might be a worthwhile fix, once you have isolated the links that are causing problems.

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