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An important tip today.

We all want our websites to do very well in rankings and beat all the competition out there and we will do whatever it takes to reach the top.

As I have mentioned previously, optimising a website from the very beginning with the help of an experienced SEO consultant is of the utmost importance.

I will give the example of an e-commerce site, as these are popular.

When an e-commerce site is built without knowledge of SEO, it starts to build up lots of problems that will be very detrimental to rankings and this will continue if nothing is done.

Some of these problems are:

• Each product starts to have duplicate URLs. The more products there are, the more duplications there is
• The site gets cached with https – a less known issue that causes a duplicate site
• Many similar products will naturally be given the same description
• Meta tags may not be optimised
• The site may be hosted in the US or have a non-UK TLD
• The URLs used for the site are not SEO friendly, so over time Google creates a large index of these

Once a site gets to this stage, it may mean that it’s impossible to get your site 100% SEO friendly. Why is this?

• The site may use a CMS that does not contain the features/functionality required and it may take too much work/money at this stage to start afresh
• Enabling SEO friendly URLs means you have to 301 redirect all the non-friendly URLs, which could potentially be thousands in number

This is why it is important to choose the right SEO company from the very beginning, otherwise, as mentioned above, you may reach a stage of no return…

Ahmed Bhula
Natural SEO Programmer

So you’ve created a site with good internal navigational structure and relevant content on each of the pages, but what do you do next? Keep your fingers crossed and hope that Google will visit your site soon and index all your pages? Well I suppose this is one technique that you could use, but a more pro-active approach would be to create a sitemap.

A recent sitemap study has shown that an increasing number of URLs are seen via sitemaps. Traditionally search engines use crawlers to find pages on the web and then follow a page’s links to discover new pages, but what about those documents that do not have any links pointing to them?

The best way to allow the crawlers to see all the pages in your site is to create an XML sitemap. An XML sitemap is simply a file that lists all the URLs for the pages in your site along with information about the priority of the page in relation to your other pages and how often the page is updated. This will also help the crawlers to better estimate how often they should return to the pages in your site.

Once completed you can submit your sitemap to the search engines which may help to speed up the time it will take the crawlers to visit your new sitemap and index your pages.

Remember to update your sitemap when you create new pages. After all, why would you go to the effort of creating a well-written optimised page if Google is never going to see it?

Gemma Neesham
Natural SEO Programmer