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RealEstateArticlesPLR.com
11-28-2006, 07:59 PM
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.

MR22
02-13-2007, 09:56 AM
Although that was a very long post, the information in it will be more than helpful to others. People should get more into google sitemaps and some of the other great tools they offer.

PaulEvans
02-21-2007, 09:50 PM
indeed, sitemaps defenatly are the way to go if you are interested in getting your site noticed on google or yahoo.

erogers
02-25-2007, 07:18 PM
I wanted to wait until I could post URLs to add to this post. I use a webmaster tool to generate my sitemaps - both HTML and Google sitemaps. Here's the link: http://www.auditmypc.com/web-master-tools.asp - someone turned me on to this tool a while ago and I use it daily. I would love to find a script that would generate an XML sitemap automatically like my wordpress plugin does. Making daily changes to my website and re-submitting the sitemap constantly is getting to be a pain.

spanishproperty
03-12-2007, 06:54 AM
I think it is better producing a sitemap manually as sometimes companies that offer services like this end up having server problems and when google, yahoo etc come to download or search your sitemap it hasnt been updated or the service is unavailable leaving your sitemap unsearched.

But there must be a script out there for automatic sitemap updating.

Monkeyleg
05-27-2007, 10:07 PM
"But there must be a script out there for automatic sitemap updating."

Yeah, I think it's called a keyboard.

Sorry, I don't mean to offend. I just have different ideas on how to get sites ranked well, and one of those is to construct pages by hand in static HTML.

Time-consuming? Yes. Results? Yes.

ChristianOC
06-09-2007, 07:37 PM
From the perspective of running one site, a keyboard is quite handy and efficient. But when you run multiple sites, software can be a life-saver.

A buddy of mine manages 337 sites. You think he has the time to use a keyboard to generate a new sitemap every time he makes changes? He uses software for everything.

Time consuming? Nope. Results? He makes about 30k a month from the web, so yes.

kelsheikh
07-06-2007, 11:41 AM
I would just creat a sitemap manually. You have to individually SEO each site anyways so it would be good to focus on one at a time.

Bogzz
07-24-2007, 09:29 AM
Nice posted, it helps for a robots to crawl quickly all the links to your site..

thedeallocator
07-27-2007, 03:35 AM
Your post is long, but very good. Beware of duplicate content, when you get articles from other people. You want to be as original as possible.

twalters84
09-30-2007, 02:03 PM
Hey there,

I totally agree that sitemaps can do wonders for your website.

There is a different between a user friendly sitemap and a search engine site map though.

For search engines sitemaps, do a google search for "site map protocol" and you will see sitemaps created in XML format. You can submit your XML sitemap to google, yahoo, and other major search engines.

For user friendly sitemaps, I would have a page with useful links on your site that people can browse through. This is what most sites have.

Using the XML sitemap method, I had over 150 pages of my clients real estate website indexed in less than a month.

For new websites, I would not submit your sitemap to search engines until your website is complete. If you are doing your website on a different server and plan to transfer it over, do not submit your sitemap on the test server or you will run into duplicate content issues.

Sincerely,
Travis Walters

the-ref
11-27-2007, 04:01 PM
Thought I'd just throw this out since we're on the topic of sitemaps. If you want search engine-friendly sitemaps, you can create them pretty easily through www.xml-sitemaps.com/. It's all free and very easy to use. Just enter your domain, download the pages it generates, put a link to them on your homepage, and upload them to your site.

Pretty simple. I've actually used it on a couple of sites and it works quite nice.

cringwall
01-09-2008, 09:34 AM
I've used the Coffee Cup Sitemap generator program for several sites, and it works well, even uploads for you. It's only 30 bucks and is well worth it.

DMike
01-10-2008, 06:18 AM
Here are some links if you want to build sitemaps on your own.
The best one around(as i see it) it's the google sitemap generator
google.com/webmasters/tools/dovs/en/sitemap-generator html

You can use this url to generate sitempas, but you're limietd to 500 links
xml-sitemaps com

And here is some info on the sitemaps, how to build them

sitemaps org

I saw the message that i'm not allowed to post links yet, make sure you
add the "." before html, com, org. Those are some links with informations