XML sitemaps inform search engines about the pages available to crawl on your website. Search engines find new pages by navigating links on websites. Sitemaps enhance search engine crawling by providing explicit information about the specific urls on your website. Sitemaps don’t ensure that your webpages will be indexed, but they typically increase both the chance and speed of indexing.
If you have fresh content on your blog or website, it is prudent to make sure the search engines know about this to get the content indexed as soon as possible. One way this is done is by pinging your xml sitemap. Although there are many search engines and services you can ping your sitemap to, make sure you concentrate on the big 3: Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
So, how do you automatically ping your updated sitemap each time your website updates? Read How to Ping Your Sitemap to Google, Yahoo, and Bing to find out:
An effective link building strategy is very important to achieve high search engine rankings, and lots of quality, converting website traffic. Getting good at link building, like anything else, takes a lot of learning, practice, and patience. If you have a lot of competition for your keywords, link building will take a lot of time and effort, but is rewarding when done correctly. To maximize your efforts, it is important to practice safe and smart link building, and not get stuck in the many pitfalls out there that can negatively impact your rankings.
Here is a list of 20 Link Building Strategy Do’s and Dont’s to help you with your link building campaigns:
The fact that the inner workings of search engine algorithms are secret and constantly evolving creates a lot of conflicting advice, tips, and recommendations in the SEO industry. The enormous uncertainty in the search engine market has created an ideal breeding ground for SEO myths. Bear in mind some of these myths were truth before, but have become myths due to the change in the search engine algorithms.
There are many myths and conflicting advice out there, my recommendation would be to learn from as many sources and qualified individuals as possible in coming to your own conclusions.
Here are my 10 SEO Myths to be aware of, that I like to call Search Engine Legends:
Google Webmaster Tools lets you view your website from Google’s perspective. It provides important reports and recommendations to make it more appealing and visible to search engines as well as visitors. In my first post on this topic, I introduced the first four of Seven Reasons Google Webmaster Tools Is Essential for SEO.
This post covers three more reasons and tips as to why Google Webmaster Tools Helps SEO:
Microsoft launched its new search engine called Bing on May 28, 2009. It is a rebranded and far superior search engine than their previous one, Live Search. I think the marketing ($80 million worth) and functionality of Bing will help it gain significant market share. Let’s face it, not many people used Live Search because of the unsexy brand name and lack of differentiators against competing search engines.
With the introduction of Bing, I think Microsoft will make significant headway in the market. Increased and innovative competition in this space can only help us, the consumers. The worst thing that could happen is for Google to actually completely monopolize the search market, and this makes that less of a possibility.
So how does Bing compare to Google? Surprisingly well. The gap between Google and Live Search has closed with the launch of Bing. Here is a head to head comparison of Bing VS Google in terms of speed, brand, functionality, and quality of results.
