SEO Sitemaps Give Websites a Boost
A lot of web pages will find an SEO sitemap useful in improving
their performance. SEO stands for "Search Engine Optimization",
the process that aims to create or revise Internet sites so that
it can be better found by search engines. The objective of SEO
campaigns is to have websites appear in the top listing or first
results page of search engines.
Internet search engines, such as Google and A9, maintain a very
large database of Web pages and available files. To do this,
they devise a program called a web crawler, or spider. This
software automatically and continuously surfs and hunts content
in the Web. Pages that the spider finds are retrieved and
indexed according to text content, giving more weight to titles
and paragraph headers. Spiders never stop navigating the web
from page to page, to index the relevant content of the
Internet. Besides looking at the text of titles and headers,
some programs are able to identify default tags and keep a
library of these page keywords or key phrases in the index.
When a user connects to the Internet types a query, which is
automatically interpreted as keywords, the search engine scans
the saved index and creates a list of web pages that is most
appropriate to what the user is searching for.
SEO will use all the combined techniques of keyword analysis,
smart code, good content literature, link popularity study and
website organization to place the subject web page as high as
possible in the list of search results in search engines. Web
pages displayed on the top of results pages are assumed to get
the most attention, and therefore, opportunity for earnings for
web businesses and pages with sponsor links.
Search engines usually return a list of results ranking pages
according to the number of Internet sites linked to them.
Results can be classified as organic, or sponsored links.
Sponsored links are shown prominently because their creators or
agents paid the search engine. Sponsored links are the main
source of income of search engines. "Organic" search results are
the lists of actual results from the engines index and are
directly related to the keyword typed in the request. One of the
more effective techniques of SEO is the creation of a
well-organized site map in a website. Since the site's main page
and other content are directly linked to a site map, spiders can
more easily move through the website, identify the key words of
the content, and index these for a search engine. This is where
the SEO sitemap helps the website creator or administrator.
Site maps are usually pages filled with links. These are shown
as tables or lists, although lists are generally more effective.
Writing code for SEO sitemaps is very easy and simple to format
and maintain. These are ideally basic HTML pages with default
tags, logical titles and keywords scattered in the Meta
description. Introduction areas can contain more of the
keywords. The site should have a main heading for every
directory.
A simple list layout helps reduce unnecessary tags that might
"hide" your keywords. Some spiders give more weight to the
following, than text in the normal body of the webpage: heading
text, content within link elements, text nearer the top of the
page and the text written for a link. Therefore, writing the
keywords and links in these areas could somehow move up the web
page's ranking. This goes for SEO sitemaps as well.
Web sites should be designed consistently, so navigation models
should follow the flow of the site map. Therefore, the first
section in the site map should be the first link in the
navigation bar.
In an SEO Sitemap, and most pages, the headings contain title
attributes where more key phrases in the site map can be added.
Keywords are generally well chosen and written in the body of a
webpage. However, in an SEO site map with little text, key words
should be added as much as possible. As much as possible, web
links should follow web page titles, and must undergo SEO during
coding. Care must be exercised not to cram the page with
keywords and links, or the page will be interpreted as blatant
spamming and not receive any traffic at all.
There is no way to guarantee that a website will be shown in the
topmost ranking of "organic" search results for an extended
period of time. However, smart and responsible SEO sitemap
techniques can be used to place the website high up in the
search position. Regular monitoring and adjustment of the SEO
Sitemap and search results would ensure that a website is kept
near the top ranking and receiving lots of web user traffic.