Submit All Content In A Single Sitemap

Sitemaps are a great way to let Google and other search engines know about the content on your website. In order to accommodate video, image, and other non-textual content, specialized sitemaps were introduced. For example, you could submit a sitemap for your html pages, another sitemap for your video content, another one for images, and so on. Seems a bit tedious, right? Well that is no longer necessary thanks to Google now supporting sitemaps that include all of your content types in a single file.

Sitemaps can now be created to reference all of your content, specified by how you want it to be found. Specifically, standard webpages can be identified for a standard web search, videos can be identified for video search and so on. Just be sure to follow the standard sitemap guidelines.

Top 5 Reccomendations To Do When Launching A Website

After you have your brilliant idea and are bringing it to the web, there are some critical factors that your website must feature to help you, the search engines and the visitors.
1) Analytics Tracking – It doesn’t matter if you have Google Analytics, Omniture or any other tracking tool. You want to understand where your visitors are coming from, and what actions they are taking when they are on your website.
2) HTML Site Map – This is an HTML page that simply lists all the pages on your website. This helps the search engines know about all of the pages on your site including the URLs that may not be discovered when the bots spider your site.
3) Keyword Research – Make sure you are adding the words people are searching for on the correct pages of your website. Keyword research will help you understand what search phrases are likely to bring the visitors who will take action on your website.
4) Test multiple browsers – Not all visitors will be using one browser. Make sure your website is seen how you want it to in all browsers possible.
5) Monitor errors – Run spider simulators on your website. This will tell you what information is wrong, what links are broken, and notify you of any issues the search engines may have.

Moving or Redesigning Your Website for SEO

Many people don’t realize that when they want to move their website to a new domain or do a redesign, it can possibly hurt your site performance in the search engines. There are ways to do this without hurting your rankings.

301 redirects are very helpful, especially if you are moving from an old domain to a new domain. A 301 redirect is a search engine friendly way to redirect your webpages to another website or webpage. The code 301 is interpreted as “moved permanently” and tells the search engines that the old website or webpage has moved to a new domain or new webpage.

If your website is listed in directories or linked to other websites, it is ideal to contact the webmaster of each site that links to yours to update the links. If this isn’t possible, another option is make sure the 301 redirect is in place so when someone clicks on your old link it will redirect to the new one.

Make sure you create a Sitemap of your website. This is helpful in making sure the spiders crawl your entire site. Make sure that the Sitemap is submitted to Google and Yahoo, so their spiders know that it is available to be crawled.

It’s also helpful to create a custom 404 page, which lists a link back to your website’s homepage as well as any other useful links or a search bar. That way, if a user happens to land on a non existent page on your site, they can search for what they’re looking for or just go back to the homepage.