Posts by rik

SEO is difficult at the best of times. However you’ll find it much more difficult on a brand new website, particularly if you wish to target a competitive market. Start your link building and on page SEO too aggressively and you may be flagged by Google early on, making the site harder to rank well and you may even get sandboxed (if you believe in it – but that’s a whole other discussion!).

One effective way to hit the ground running with your new website is to build it on a domain name that already has some history. Simply put, a domain name that already has some good backlinks and has a presence in Google. While a good domain name might not be particularly easy or cheap to get hold of, it will certainly benefit your SEO campaign in the short term.

With much of the domain trust and age already in place, sites built on older domains (with the relevant SEO campaign in place) are much more likely to be able to compete in Google rankings for competitive terms.

Rik
Senior SEO Programmer

While Google’s web crawlers (Googlebots) are becoming increasing efficient at indexing web pages, it certainly can’t hurt for a webmaster to provide them with a helping hand. Particularly on very large websites where some important pages may be buried deep within the navigation, Google may have problems crawling this deeply and indexing those pages.

This is where XML sitemaps come in extremely handy!

XML sitemaps are basically files with a list of pages within a website that search engines can read. Written in the XML language (hence the name), they are built to a specific standard that all the major search engines – Google, Yahoo, Live and subsequently most other search engines – read and index.

To create an XML sitemap for your website you will likely need to have an understanding of the XML sitemap syntax, details of which can be found at: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php. If you’re not familiar with the syntax, there are plenty of XML sitemap generators available online for free (an online search for ‘XML sitemap generator’ will likely turn up a plethora of choices!)

Once created, you will need to let search engines know about the existence of your sitemap, which can be done in a number of ways; you can link to the sitemap on your website, link to the sitemap through your robots.txt file, or even submit directly to the major search engines through their webmaster tools.

Rik Weber
Senior Web Developer