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The best professional SEO team can perform strategic key word analysis, and then you can end-up paying thousands of hundreds of dollars to have your web site search engine optimized. There can be countless hours spent on Web marketing efforts. Nothing will be as helpful as simply adding a sitemap on your site and simply updating your web content with relevant text.
A sitemap will never increase your rankings to the top of Google's rankings for every key phrase you target. But it can bring a nice boost on traffic to a poorly indexed website. And where a professional SEO team can cost a small fortune, creating a sitemap will likely only cost a few development hours.
Besides being economical and easy, a sitemap serves two highly functional SEO objectives. A good designed site map allows for search engines to simply locate and easily index all relevant pages of your website that will allow for keyword reinforcement of pages through the use of descriptive linking text.
A good sitemap must include many of the same features one might see on any keenly optimized Web page. For example, clean, uncomplicated coding is ideal. You must keep any Java or CSS in external files and keep tables simple, if existent at all- CSS or division-based should replace tables most possible. Also, using Meta , Tide, and Robot Tags will provide directions and ways to help search engines index and rank a page. Most important, however, is the use of text links.
Text links are the most basic link formats for search engines to index and follow, and the text in the link provides clues to help with relevant ranking. Ideally, these links should be key phrases.
A common mistake is the use of image, Java, and Flash links that tend to be unreadable to search engines, but will give you a nice look on your web design.
Another way to increase the SEO advantages of a sitemap is through the use of logical categories or groupings for your page links. These similar groupings create blocks of themed content which go a step further toward enhancing the relevance and strength of the keyword-based text links.
Apart from a sitemap's description, its actual placement on the server is also important. Sitemaps should be as easy to locate for a search engine. This means a sitemap should not be hidden in deep folders or on sub domains, but placed as close to the root directory level as possible. And the easier it is to find, the easier it is to index the entire website.
Links to the sitemap should ideally be set up from all Web pages in a website. This is most easily accomplished by adding the link to a footer or header include. Theoretically, it is best for a sitemap link to be placed at the top of Web page since search spiders look at a page from top to bottom.Thus, footer links will be just as effective.
An easy way to test how well a sitemap is working is to run a site query on the major search engines to see if there has been an increase of the number of pages indexed.
In Google, Yahoo, and MSN type Site:YourWebsiteName.com You can also look at your traffic stats to see if there has been an increase in visitors. Google's free analytics tool is a good option.
If there is only one thing you can do to improve your website's organic traffic and budget is a concern, creating a sitemap could be the most beneficial. Not only does it make it easier for search engines to find your pages but it also provides clues to help them determine ranking. These simple benefits combined with its ease of implementation make a sitemap a great SEO solution.
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