Importance of Having a Sitemap to SEO

The online business world is fast paced and always evolving. Everyone is always looking for new techniques and methods that will make their website user-friendly for online visitors as well as to search engine spiders – without deviating from the rules of SEO. Many tips have been released and published by so called “webmasters” regarding how to effectively optimize a website, however, most of the time the significance of a sitemap is being neglected.

To point out the importance of sitemaps, just take a look at Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, you’ll find discussions on the importance of having sitemaps and in fact, Google even launched a Google Sitemap Generator which you can use on your website.

In the world of SEO, it is important that you pay attention to what Google is talking about because despite the presence of other search engines like Yahoo and Bing, Google maintains the top spot in the world of search engines, so if it’s talking about sitemaps and its importance, it’s high time for you to listen. And if Google already acknowledges the fact that sitemaps contributes to have your website indexed faster, then it’s not a waste of time to incorporate one on your site.

What Is a Sitemap?

A sitemap is an illustration or outline of your website and the link for this is generally located on the main page of a website. It shows and indicates the framework of your website such as the available sections and the links between them. Basically, it tells search engine spiders about the pages on a website that are already available for crawling as it lays out each and every page of your website’s navigation. Each time a new page is added to your website, it is automatically logged on the sitemap which in turn alerts and instructs the search engine spiders to start crawling, pointing them to a particular page where the new article or page has been added. Any important information within a website will be highlighted by the sitemap, which will allow crawlers to instantly catch it. Websites using flashy images, portion of which are only material to the page content, will greatly benefit from sitemaps.

A sitemap also makes it easier for your visitors as well as for search engine spiders to navigate through your website. A sitemap’s function is totally opposite with that of robot.txt because with the former, you instruct search engine spiders where you would like them to go, and as for the latter, search engines are instructed to exclude a certain part of your website from indexing. 

Importance of Sitemap 

1. It will help users to easily navigate on your website as it gives your users an outline of the site’s content.

2. Better visibility and makes it easier for search engines to rank a website’s content, so most likely, it will be indexed and get a better ranked in the Search Engine Results Pages.

3. It encourages and directs search engine spiders exactly where you want them to be.

4. It immediately informs search engine spiders about any changes on your website.

5. By having and submitting a sitemap to the search engines, you don’t have to depend that much on external links.

6. It helps in organizing your website content.

Two Types of Sitemaps

HTML Sitemap (User Sitemap) – is the standard view of all the pages of your website as it provides the link for all the pages of your website. This type of sitemap will help your visitors as well as the search engines to find your content pages. It will make a lot easier for your visitors to find the information that they are looking for. Some of the benefits of having an HTML sitemap are:

• it makes user navigation easier,

• it organizes or arranges each section of your website,

• it communicates the overall theme of your website, and

• your users will find it easier to link within the website

Links for an HTML sitemap is usually placed either at the header or footer of a website.

XML Sitemap (SEO Sitemap) – are exclusively and specifically created for the benefit of search engines. This was introduced by Google basically for the benefit of website owners and of the search engine spiders as it puts all the URLs of a website in one place thereby making it easier for the spiders to locate them. This involves the process of submitting their site pages for search engine spiders to find and indexed them. A perfectly constructed sitemap will guide and tell the search engines the topics on your site, how frequently those pages are being updated, and the date when they were last modified. By using an XML sitemap, search engines will know the specific pages that they have to regularly visit and from there, your pages will be indexed.

However, it should also be noted that incorporating an XML sitemap to your website and submitting it to search engines won’t necessarily affect your search engine ranking as it still depends on the content of your site, but it will help a lot, especially if you have a large website, for your pages to be indexed in search engines.

Conclusion

Incorporating a sitemap to your website may help boost your website’s ranking in the search engine results pages but what’s more important is that it will give your website a better chance of being indexed by the search engines.

If you think you have done everything to improve your website but still your pages are not getting indexed, then don’t wait another minute as your online visibility suffers for every minute that you are wasting. Consider having a sitemap on your website. Although there is no guarantee that your page rank will increase just by having one, using it with your usual SEO strategies will definitely put you one step ahead toward improved online visibility.

Targeting the Right Keywords for an Effective Online Advertising Campaign

Many successful businessmen in the real world are now shifting to a different level of promoting their business, and that is through online marketing or online advertisements. However, physical marketing is very different from online marketing as they have different means of promoting the business.

You may be very well adept in promoting your business in the physical sense but when it comes to online business, your efforts won't even be recognized if you do not know the proper techniques to make your website visible in search engines, and for it to land on the first page of search engine results. 

You may have already heard that in order for your website to be visible, you have to optimize. But before optimizing your website, there's one important thing that you should also keep in mind - choosing the right set of keywords.

Online advertisers often commit the mistake of optimizing their website without first considering the keywords to use and its relevance to their website content and target customers; thus, most of them keep wondering why traffic on their website is not improving after exerting countless efforts to optimize its content.

Keyword research is most likely the most important part of all SEO activities and it is also one of the most important steps that you will take once you start to optimize your website. For this reason, you need a keyword research tool, like KeywordSpy, which will guide and help you in getting the relevant and right set of keywords for your campaign.

KeywordSpy will not only tell you the keywords that your competitors are using in their PPC advertising campaigns such as Google Adwords, by using this tool, you will also see which among those keywords are profitable and from there, you can already determine the keywords that you will use in your campaign.

Simply put, KeywordSpy allows you to gather keyword intelligence not just for your PPC advertising campaigns but for your Search Engine Optimization strategies as well. The Organic data for KeywordSpy results allows you to gather competitor information using related keywords in their website content. PPC information can also be applied in SEO by gathering keyword information that is working for PPC ads and adopting them to your website's content with reduced cost in your online marketing.

After choosing the best keyword tool that will help you with your research, you are now ready to select the right set of keywords for your campaign.

Here is a five item guide you can use in selecting the right keywords for maximum results:

1. Make a list – The first list you should create should be as broad as possible. Tap people that are involved in your business. Think of all possible keywords that are related to your product or service.

2. Refine your list – This is much difficult than making the first list, but this will zoom you right in the money-making keywords. Narrow down your choices from around 400 terms then continue narrowing down to around 80-100. Try using the keywords yourself to find out what pages will be returned. This will help you a lot in deciding which terms are relevant to your campaign.

3. Run a pilot test – You may want to do this by signing up for free blogging pages or you may directly post on your business website. Post your keyword optimized articles then perform targeted keyword search after a week or two. This will return valuable information as to whether you are using the right keyword and/or keyword combination for your published articles.

4. Analyze top ranking pages – After running your pilot test, it is imperative that you perform a comparative analysis of your website content versus your competitor’s content, preferably those that have high rankings in targeted keyword search results.

5. Integrate results – Lastly, integrate results of your comparative analysis with your own keyword campaign. Doing this technically brings you back to step no. 2 which asks you to refine your list. Keep in mind that Search Engine Optimization is an on-going process; hence any process workflow will tend to be cyclical in nature.

There is the five item guide for researching the right keywords for your website. Your guide terms are List, List, Test, Analyze, and Integrate. Following the process outlined above will surely make things easier for you to come up with an effective SEO campaign.

Site Target Marketing: Getting to Know Your Website's Target Market

Every businessman’s main goal when putting up an online business is to generate sales and to make their website popular. However, marketing isn’t just about letting as many people as possible to know about your business, what’s more important is to let the right people know about your business. How you market and to whom you are marketing are two of the most important questions that every businessman should consider.

So, before starting an SEO campaign, the first thing that every online advertiser should do is to set their target market as this is an important, if not the most important, step in business planning.  Before jumping into any marketing strategies, one should first focus on reaching a very specific target as this will increase your chances of success in the online marketing industry.

Let’s put it this way, imagine yourself trying to shoot a basketball on a ring with your eyes blindfolded, hard isn’t it? In fact, it is nearly impossible to shoot that ball if you can’t even see your target; this concept is applicable to every online business as doing one without having a definite goal or target market will keep you from accomplishing your goal, and that is to generate remarkable sales, get high volume of qualified traffic, create online awareness of your brand over your competitors, broaden your market share, etc.

What is a Target Market and SEO Target Marketing?

Target market is a group of individuals, your main audience, or the visitors that you want to visit your website, which will eventually turn into potential buyers that would avail of your products and services. Target market can be identified in two ways, through demographic profile or psycho graphic profile. Most of the time, your target market will have similar characteristics such as age, gender, education, occupation, and or live in the same geographical area.

It is important to identify your target market in detail before launching your business or website as this will help you in creating a competitive and effective online marketing plan; moreover, this will help you pinpoint the most suitable internet marketing techniques in order to fully maximize your return of investment (ROI). So it is safe to say that the main goal of target marketing is to increase your business’ or website’s efficiency while decreasing your advertising costs.

Target Marketing for SEO is very much similar to ordinary target marketing, as they adhere to the same principle and goal, which is to focus on specific segments of the marketplace, and that, is to cater to those who are interested to your products or services.

SEO target marketing refers to the research and strategy of selecting the most effective terms and keywords to drive the best customer types or best visitor types to your website. The only difference it has with ordinary target marketing is that this one does not only focus on the volume of traffic but it is more concerned on getting high volume of qualified traffic.

Importance of SEO Target Marketing

If you think about it, more than 70% of your website visits come from search engines while the remaining 30% may be a website’s existing customers. Majority of website traffic originated from search engines. In this case, although SEO may only be a part of your marketing strategy, it can’t be denied that it is one of the most significant portion of your plan. Here are some of the benefits that you can get by applying Standard SEO and SEO Target Marketing in your online business: 

  Increase qualified web traffic

  It will maximize your ROI

  Greater conversion rates

  Expanded market share

  Greater awareness of your brand over your competitors

Things to Consider in SEO Target Marketing

1. Defining Your Target Audience.  This involves identifying your audience's age groups, genders, income levels, location, interests, and the likes if they are applicable to the business or website that you're putting up.

Some of the things that you need to keep in mind in choosing and identifying a website's target market are:

• The size of the target market.

• The actual state of your target market (whether your target market is growing or shrinking)

• Whether there is a demand, or lack of it, for your online business in your chosen target market. 

• The probability of monetizing your target market. 

• Possible things that might influence your target market.

After you have properly identified your target market, you can now proceed to the different internet marketing strategies that will help you promote your website or online business. 

2. Market Research.  This is done by catering to a specific demographic or market group. There are lots of sources of market research and some of them have already been gathered and compiled, which you can get by going through the internet or visiting your local library for studies and data that have been compiled and gathered for your particular industry. Just keep in mind that you are conducting market research for three specific goals, first, to identify your competitors' target markets and the one that they are currently catering to; second, to identify the markets where your business will be most profitable; and finally, to pinpoint the specific areas or location where market opportunities exist for your online business.

3. Finding the Right Keyword Phrases. Finding the right phrases for your website or online business is extremely important as this will help drive qualified traffic to your site. For instance, if you are running a flower shop in Miami, Florida, then you should focus on targeting your keyword search along that area because it is where your target market will come from. So instead of using the keyword phrase "flower shop" you should use "flower shop in Miami" to get the right kind of visitors that may turn up as potential buyers.

4. Focus on Having the Right Visitors on Your Site. Don't merely focus on gaining a large number of visitors coming in to your site. SEO target marketing is about getting the right visitors (qualified traffic) to your site even if this means having fewer hits.

5. Getting the Right Inbound Links. Some website owners spend countless hours obtaining as many links as they can in order to increase their inbound links. Although inbound links are important to SEO, not all of them are relevant. Thus, it is important that you only focus on obtaining inbound links that are relevant to your site or inbound links that originated from websites that your target market will surely visit.

6. Know your Competitors. Knowing your competitors' next move, such as determining where they are getting their links and determining their target locations, is another aspect that SEO target marketing is dealing with.

There are still other factors that may be considered in SEO target marketing but the above mentioned factors are by far the most important. By just picking a keyword or keyword phrase, incorporating it to your website, and making some slight SEO modifications, you're ready to target potential customers. This is what makes SEO target marketing very powerful - with a little amount of work; you can create online businesses and web pages that are targeting specific words that will later turn the targeted visitors into buyers and revenue.

Search Engine Suicide - Are you Committing the Same Search Engine Mistakes?

Have you ever wondered why traffic on your website is not improving after exerting efforts to optimize content?  Do you think you’ve done everything to secure a spot on the first page of every search engine but still you’re countless efforts are going nowhere? Maybe you have the right things on your mind but you are executing them the wrong way.

Internet marketing is a very complicated business and even a little mistake can severely affect your ranking on search engines. You may be killing your own website without you knowing it, thus putting all your efforts to waste. To avoid being in this kind of scenario, here are the lists of common SEO mistakes which you should avoid:

1. Look vs. Content (Using Lots of Animation and Graphics on your Website).  Having flash animation may look cool and fancy, and it may even attract lots of visitors on your website, however, they don’t contribute at all to your page being listed on the first page of SERP’s as they seldom comprise any content that can be indexed, thus more often than not, it ends up being ignored by search engine spiders. Instead of using your space on GIF or JPEG Images, why don’t you focus on what’s really important, the one that determines your SERP’s, and that’s the content of your website. Remember that search engines mainly focus on the text incorporated in your website for them to index it and they are not interested on flashy images and characters that may be occupying your entire page, so if search engine rankings are important to you, make sure there are plenty of text contents for spiders to find. Always remember the most important phrase in the SEO world: Content is King and you’ll never go wrong with it.

2. Use of Frames on Your Website. If you are guilty of this practice, go ahead and remove the frame on your website now as search engine robots do not and cannot index pages with frames, thus you are just wasting your precious time putting one on your website. In fact, use of frames is considered as one of the top ten mistakes in web design.

3. Targeting the Wrong Keywords. Make sure that you are using the right keywords, keywords which visitors are likely to type in the search bar, on your website to attract traffic. It should be noted that keyword selection is absolutely one of the critical elements of website design as choosing the proper keywords will lead or enable potential customers to find your site. Make sure that the content on your Web pages contains the keywords that are important for your site. Keyword research is the key in determining and finding the proper keywords to use on a particular website and it is also good to invest in a good keyword research tool like KeywordSpy to help you with your research.

4. Using Irrelevant Keywords on your Website to Attract More Traffic. There are many unethical website owners who try to increase the search engine visibility of their site by using keywords that have nothing to do with their website; of course, it is very tempting to use keywords with low competition especially if these keywords also present great traffic numbers, however, if you use keywords or keyword phrases that have nothing to do with your website, visitors will simply leave and much worse, they may report your website as spam to the search engines. So, as early as now, you should realize that you may use keywords with high traffic numbers but all the traffic won’t help you if it’s off your target. 

5. Keyword Stuffing. As stated earlier, Content is King, thus it is important that your website’s content must make sense and not just full of keywords that have no relevance to each other. With the algorithm that Google has been using, old tricks like use of plenty of keywords and various keyword repetition to obtain better search rankings, increasing keyword density about 10%, and using “invisible” keywords, is no longer feasible, so don’t even bother with these outdated tricks.

Aside from the above mentioned SEO mistakes, there are still plenty of other ways to commit search engine suicide, so all you have to do is to watch out for them, and if you are already guilty of doing some, if not all of them, then it’s high time for you to stop using them on your website before it suffers some more in terms of search engine rankings. These mistakes are very common and it is not that difficult to avoid them, just apply a good SEO plan on your website, find out the kind of information your customers are actually looking for, and then give it to them, and you are off to a good start.