Need help with more than just coming up with keywords? Keyword Pad is an advanced keyword generation tool with many features. This tool not only helps come up with keywords, it allows you to clean keyword phrases, search and replace, and merge and export keyword lists.
Sitemaps are used to tell the search engines about pages on your website that may not otherwise be discovered by the search engines. Generally there are two types of Sitemaps – a HTML Sitemap or a XML Sitemap. Both types will contain a list of the URL’s that lead to pages within your website.
The HTML Sitemap will contain an organized list of HTML coded text links pointing to the important pages on your website. See an example of what a HTML Sitemap looks like at:
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The XML Sitemap will contain a XML structured list of URL’s pointing to all pages on your website which you want the search engines to know about. See an example of what a XML Sitemap looks like at:
If you are knowledgeable about HTML and you know how to hand code, you can create your HTML Sitemap file using a text editor such as Notepad. If you want to spend less time creating the file then use Adobe Dreamweaver or another HTML editor to assist you.
Creating a XML Sitemap file for your website is considered an SEO best practice. You can create a XML Sitemap file based on the Sitemap protocol either by manually hand coding the file or more efficiently by using a XML Sitemap generator. You can try my favorite XML Sitemap generator here.
XML Sitemaps are useful because you can include metadata for various types of content on your website, including video, images, mobile, News, and web page source code. You can also specify within your XML Sitemap the date on which a file on your website was last updated. This indicates to the search engines when they need to revisit your files and spider them. Additionally, you can specify the frequency at which you wish for your files to be revisited by the search engines. You can also assign varying levels of priority to each file listed within your XML Sitemap. Generally your homepage should have the highest priority assigned to it.
There are several important reasons that you should be using a XML Sitemap on your website:
* Your website uses AJAX, is image intensive or your content is not easily discoverable by the search engines.
* Your website hosts dynamic content and your URL’s have all kinds of funky characters or use session ID’s in them.
* Your website is brand new and has very little in the way of links from other websites pointing to it.
* Your website has lots of orphaned pages within it that are not linked to internally from your home page or other sub pages inside of your website.
Submitting Your XML Sitemap
We’re only going to address submitting to Google.com and to Bing.com. These are the engines that matter most at the present time. Yahoo uses Bing’s search index to power their own search results. So submitting to Bing will get you listed in Yahoo’s organic results.
Submit to Google.com
If you have not already done so, create an account for yourself at google.com/webmasters then login and add your website address to your Google Webmaster Tools account, then follow the on-screen instructions to verify your ownership of the website. On the Webmaster Tools main page, click the website that you wish to work with, then under Site Configuration, click Sitemaps. Click the Add/Test Sitemap button. In the text field paste or type the URL address to your Sitemap file – i.e. <http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml>. Then click the Submit Sitemap button.
Submit to Bing.com
Create an account for yourself at bing.com/toolbox/webmaster, if you have not already done so, then login. On the Home tab, add your websiteURL – i.e. <http://www.yourdomain.com> and then follow the on-screen instructions to verify your ownership of the website. Then again on the Home tab, click the website that you wish to work with, then click the Crawl tab. Click Sitemaps and then click Add Feed. In the Add Feed dialog window you just paste or type the URL to your XML Sitemap file – i.e. <http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml>, then click the Submit button.
Pro Tips
Pro Tip: if you have more than just a few XML Sitemap files to submit which all belong to the same domain name, we recommend that you create a single Sitemap index file that lists the other Sitemap files on your site, and then submit the index Sitemap file only and do not submit the XML Sitemap files that are lísted in the indéx file. Search engínes will discover and visit other XML Sitemap file URL’s within an index XML Sitemap file.
Another Pro Tip: After you have created your XML Sitemap file and have uploaded it to your website you should reference the location of your XML Sitemap file inside of your robots.txt file. For more about robots.txt see this article. The proper way in which you reference your XML Sitemap file inside of your robots.txt file is to simply append the following line into your robots.txt file -
Sitemap: <http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml>
Now that you know about Sitemaps, why they are important, how to create and use them – drop what you’re doing and go create your Sitemaps now, then watch for an growth in the number of pages that the search engines index on your website.
All online retailers experience shopping cart abandonment. In fact, with rates averaging between 60-70%, marketers know that the majority of shoppers who start the checkout process will leave before completing it.
Those departing shoppers represent a significant amount of revenue. To capture as much of that revenue as possible, you need to be aware of reasons for abandonment and the top strategies for bringing those shoppers back.
For this white paper, we examined the carting experience and follow-up email strategies of 100 retailers. In it, you’ll discover:
As the Web progresses, so does the refinement of the top search engines and the algorithms they utilize to ascertain important content in cyberspace. Relevant is the key word here, which means valuable to the searcher and the most likely to be exactly what they are searching for. Rolling into 2012, search engines such as Yahoo have begun to understand that keyword matching is only an aspect of the formula to determine relevancy, and that the value and the authority level of the web page is turning into a larger determinant of search relevancy.
That brings us to your link building approach as a webmaster, small business owner, or online entrepreneur as we commence 2012. The following five link building suggestions get you the backlinks and relevance you will certainly need this year:
1. Multiple, Applicable Links
All of us want a million backlinks to our blogs, and trust me, with a little bit of cash, you can get them. There are lots of linkbuilding deals at Fiverr.com and sites such as The Hoist that will sell you literally hundreds of links. Trouble is, Google is looking for quality which means pages linking to yours must be complementary, in the same market space, and in some way associated to your content. Your landing page should somehow be an offshoot of the ideas presented on the linking site. If that site has to do with gourmet foods and your page is addressed to unwed parents, that sort of link will likely not help you a great deal and in fact can harm your Google rank.
So just how can you get them?
* Get in touch with site owners wanting to swap links for starters, usually done in a resources page. This is still a strong technique and has been around for years.
* Leave blog remarks on posts with the same material as yours, specifically authority sites (more on this later).
* Distribute your original articles for publishing on news and blog sites that are a normal match to yours.
* Post relevant links to your website on social media portals like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The best are links to blog columns or landing pages relevant to Twitter trends or hash-tag lists and LinkedIn discussion groups.
2. Neighbors Like You
The world of online search is going local and is placing more and more focus on local sites. Even if your company is not constricted to where you reside (like an online SEO website that may be able to work for clients globally), it is more useful than ever before for local companies to be linking to yours. Socialize in your Chamber of Commerce and encourage link exchange, keeping in mind that the more similar these companies are to yours (and they’re local), the better off you are. If your SEO establishment is in San Diego, encourage your local links to say “SEO San Diego” to ensure your link is pertinent to their audience.
3. Submit Your Work
There are two primary kinds of authority sites in the internet world: big, highly trafficked, content specific sites (consider Inc.com, Wall Street Journal), and educational and governmental sites. Search engines are still giving lots of credít to university .edu sites and .gov pages, especially the federal government (who knew).
The major ways to obtain backlinks from these sites are to provide valuable, one-of-a-kind content in the form of articles or to post comments to content already on these websites. If you’re lucky enough to hand in great content and get yourself published on a high-authority content site, that is worth its weight in gold to your link building efforts.
Don’t throw away your time with auto-posting, scraping applications that are going to write nonsense responses for you. They’ll post, but in most instances will be deleted in the monitoring of the site. You can browse the web and find listings of good PR .edu and .gov websites (ones with a PR of 4, 5, 6, 7) that allow for forum postings with backlinks. Buyer beware and regularly test the domains, applying PR Checker.
4. Anchor Text Strategy
This is one thing you can most easily control using Article Marketing tactics, where you submit content for syndication and publication on high ranking sites. The actual words in your hyperlink, called anchor text, have to be pertinent to both the page on the site that is featuring your work and also to the destination website that the link goes to. That means that, if you are linking “clíck here,” you’re skipping half the benefit of this linking technique.
So how does this work? Going back to our example of the gourmet cooking site, you publish an article on that blog about your favorite ways to use cooking sherry, then throughout the body of the article you link your red wine reduction recipe to, you guessed it, a webpage that consists of exactly that. Give that guy a prize!
5. Landing Pages
We just talked about how your landing pages ought to be pertinent to the link. You ought to also be linking to various pages on your website, commonly referred to as deep links, and not only your homepage. This method ought to be easy if your website is structured properly with a product page for each product and an article for each idea you may be linking to. This informs the search engines that your domain is material rich on numerous pages, and that is vital to you earning the relevance trophy.
Is doing these things simple? Nope, but that’s exactly the point. You are doing it the right way, and that practice will reward link builders in 2012.
Ever wonder how much influence your brand has on Social Media? Klout is a free tool that makes it easy to track your influence by using data from Twitter and Facebook. Klout displays the information in simple graphs and diagrams and also provides the probability that your message will be retweeted, stats on which users you have an influence on and much more. So go ahead and give it a try: http://klout.com/home
Here is a free and easy way to analyze your web pages. Check out the SEO Workers – Web Page Analysis Tool. This tool examines headers, title tags, keywords and more, plus looks at how a page may be displayed in the the search results. So check out it out now to get help optimizing your site for better search engine rankings. http://www.seoworkers.com/tools/analyzer.html
Today I browsed through the 3,500 or so SEO questions people asked at Google and chose the most common ones to answer. I figured that, if so many people were seeking out answers for these SEO questions at Google, many of you may also be wondering the same things.
Unsurprisingly, many questions were along the line of “How do I get my site found in Google?” (Answer: Read everything the High Rankings website!) And sadly, there were tons of questions about Meta keywords, as if they had anything to do with SEO. But there were lots of specific questions that you may also have wondered about recently, from very basic things that we in the biz assume everybody already knows to what’s happening right now with Google’s latest algorithm changes. (I’m starting out with the more tricky technical ones. If those go over your head, please scroll down to the “On-page SEO Question” section.)
Let’s dig right in…
Technical Google Questions
Q. Can I recover from Google’s “Penguin Update”?
A. For those who don’t know, Penguin is the name of Google’s latest algorithm change that came out toward the end of April 2012. At this point, it’s too early to have had any Penguin recoveries. However, as with any Google update, of course you can recover from it as soon as you understand what it was that your site had (or didn’t have) that caused it to be nuked from the search results. From what I’ve seen so far, Penguin is simply an extension of Panda. Reading what I wrote in “Why SEO in All the Right Places No Longer Works” is a good place to start your recovery.
Q. How do we know about unnatural links to our website?
A. You can use backlink checker tools to find some of them. Or ask the jerk spammer company who purchased them for you. 
Q. How do I find the number of pages of my site that Google has indexed?
A. The quickest and easiest way is via a “site:command” at Google. Go to the Google search box and type: site:example.com and hit the search button. You’ll then see at the top of the page: “About xx,xxx results.” That’s the approximate number of URLs from your site that they have indexed. You’ll be able to scroll through the first 1,000 results, but that’s about it. Please note that site:command isn’t 100% accurate and you may find vastly different results from one day to the next.
If you want to see how many pages Google has indexed that actually bring traffic to your website, SEOmoz had a post from 2010 that shows how to find that number in your Google Analytics. I’ve taken that a step further and created a custom report that does something similar.
Q. How often does Google update its search results? (Or another variation: How long does Google take to index pages?)
A. In the early days of Google, it could take up to a month for pages to get indexed. And the search results would shift once a month or so during what was called the “Google Dance.” Today, due to much more processing power and many different data centers, most existing sites see new pages getting indexed almost immediately. This in turn causes the search results to also change constantly. Even brand-new sites will often be indexed within a few days if they ping Google and/or have a few tweets that announce it.
Q. Can you have two domains for the same site?
A. You can have as many domains for the same site as you’d like. However, you typically want only one of those domains to be indexed by the search engines. Use 301-redirects to point to your main domain from your extra domains for best results.
Q. Can a web crawler find unlinked pages?
A. They do seem to manage to find them these days, so be sure to exclude them via your robots.txt page and/or through a robots=noindex tag.
Q. Does the canonical link need to go on every page of the website?
A. The canonical link element aka rel=canonical doesn’t necessarily need to be on any page of your site. But if there is a chance of pages having URLs that get appended one way or another with stuff that doesn’t change the content, it’s not a bad idea to use rel=canonical to ensure that Google indexes only the correct (main) URL. It will also pass all the link popularity to the main URL as well. All pages where the URLs may get appended should use rel=canonical.
Q. Will deleting duplicate content from my website get me ranked again?
A. If the duplicate content on your site was what caused you to somehow lose rankings, then yes. Just remember that it’s doubtful that your site was penalized for having duplicate content. What may have happened, however, is that you split the link popularity of your content between multiple URLs, which can definitely affect rankings. In which case, using rel=canonical as mentioned previously can help.
Q. How are search rankings affected by a domain name change?
A. If you 301-redirect the old domain to the new, tell Google about the new website address within your Google Webmaster Tools (GWMT) account, set up a new GWMT account for the new domain, and change as many of the old links to point to the new domain, your rankings and traffic shouldn’t be affected.
Q. If forum signature links can be seen only by members, does Google count them?
A. If the forum has set the Google spider to be a “guest” and not a “member” (which is the norm), then no, they can’t see the signatures and therefore can’t/won’t count them. That’s how we purposely have it set at the High Rankings Forum, but every forum has its own unique settings.
Q. What is the best for SEO: PHP or HTML?
A. By the time it gets to the browser, PHP is in HTML form, therefore they’re both the same as far as search engines and SEO are concerned.
Author
Jill Whalen is the CEO of High Rankings, an SEO Consulting company in the Boston
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