Daniel Coburn

Today I read an article about how sitemap.xml files are not as useful as some people say they are in the world of SEO.  The argument was just because you have a page in the Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. index doesn’t get it ranked.  And I completely agree with them that just because it’s there doesn’t give it rank.  So the question needs to be why use a sitemap.xml file, and once you have them what do you do? Also what about a human consumable sitemap? What’s it’s function and why should you have one that is bot friendly?

First lets tackle the sitemap.xml.  These things are must haves, for a few of reasons.  They help you get your full site indexed, they help you get new pages into the indexes fast, they allow navigation of pages that might be isolated because of no-follow strategies,  and they let you set information about each page, such as how often it’s modified and it’s page priority.

A sitemap.xml is only going to get your pages into the search engine, it will be up to the public (and to some level you) to “vote” on how important those pages are to the world. 

What are the first steps to creating a sitemap.xml file? There are several ways to create a file, the simplest is to find an application that will spider your site and create an xml file for you… easy enough, but what happens if you have massive amounts of pages? Firstly you cannot exceed 50k links per file or 10 mb max, so if you do have more you will have to split your map up into multiple pieces.  The syntax for the “root” is pretty simple

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<sitemapindex xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
  <sitemap>
    <loc>http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap_01.xml</loc>
    <lastmod>2007-01-08</lastmod>
  </sitemap>
 <sitemap>
    <loc>http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap_02.xml</loc>
    <lastmod>2007-01-08</lastmod>
  </sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

This will allow a company to get million’s of pages indexed into search engines, vs. thousands.  Once you get the pages in the index, now the magic begins.  Let us jump to user consumable sitemaps and their SEO benefit or purpose.

A user consumable sitemap is one that a person could go to and click around to view pages, ALL pages on your website.  One of the major sin’s I’ve seen is the development of really cool looking sitemaps, that are dhtml/javascript heavy and use those technologies to render elements on clicks, or throw AJAX content into a div for user consumption.  The biggest problem here is that search engines cannot read any of it.  The pages need to be bot friend and user consumable.  This means, no more than 100 links per page and keyword rich links. 

“Daniel WHAT? ONLY 100 LINKS!” — yes 100 links otherwise you get link spammy and that’s not very good, it makes the spiders think you are a link farm.  So there’s this really cool thing called Pagination! And yes those links need to be bot friendly too so they can find the next page.

What this will do is help start creating an internal linking that will allow spiders to find your pages, and start building internal link juice.  This will begin to start allowing them to be one of the more popular kids on the block.  Now all you have to do is start working on external content…. but that’s down the road a bit.

A friend emailed me this list as a follow up to my Press Releases post

80 PR Submission Sites;

www.24-7pressrelease.com
www.baygo.com/press
www.betanews.com
www.bizeurope.com/pressrelease.htm
www.dime-co.com
www.downloadjunction.com
www.free-press-release.com
www.i-newswire.com
www.learn-more.org
www.malebits.com
www.newsreelnetwork.com
www.openpr.com
www.pr.com
www.pressbox.co.uk
www.pressmethod.com
www.programmersheaven.com
www.promotionworld.com
www.morganarticlearchive.com/cgi-bin/submit.pl
www.webnewswire.com
www.XpressPress.com
www.articlealley.com
www.articleblast.com
www.articlecodex.com
www.articlecube.com
www.articledashboard.com
www.articlesphere.com
www.articopia.com
www.bestsyndication.com
www.betanews.com
www.businessportal24.com
www.cincinnati.com
www.clickpress.com
www.dailyrecord.com
www.delawareonline.com
www.directionsmag.com
www.earthtoys.com
www.epscene.com
www.ezinearticles.com
www.franchisenewscenter.com
www.freepressindex.com
www.free-press-release.info
www.free-press-release-center.info
www.mediasyndicate.com/
www.pressreleases.kcstar.com
www.prurgent.com/submit.htm
www.transworldnews.com
www.ukprwire.com
www.usprwire.com
www.prwindow.com
www.myfreepr.com
www.pressexposure.com
www.pressreleasecirculation.com
www.goarticles.com
www.articlesmagazine.com
www.viloria.info
www.freepressreleases.co.uk
www.freepressindex.com/imediate_press_release.asp
www.ecommwire.com
www.pressflow.co.uk./submitnews.html
www.prcompass.com/
www.techprspider.com/AddFeed.aspx
www.pressreleasepoint.com
www.prfocus.com/post.html
www.anyrelease.com/submit/
www.blog-ride.co.uk
www.sanepr.com
www.ducttapemarketing.com/Instant-Press-Release.htm
www.bignews.biz
www.efytimes.com/press/default1.asp
www.freshnews.com/sdtn/prrelease.shtml
www.nationalhomelandsecurityknowledgebase.com
www.theopenpress.com
www.feelgr8.co.uk
www.amirazemati.com
www.linux.com
www.webpronews.com/submit
www.thewhir.com/find/articlecentral/suggest.asp
www.selfseo.com/submitstory.php
www.articledepot.co.uk
www.media13.com/newarticle.php

~ Courtesy of NewsReelNetwork

One of the most overlooked way to obtain quality inbound links is by using press releases.  Just about every site or company can come up with a reason to do a press release.  If you place a logical link in your release to your site and it’s picked up by a company then you’ll have another link into your site.  Now put it in persepective, you can some times get  a release picked up by 100’s of sites, now imagine doing a good release once a month, you could get a significant amount of new links every month and you can publish release for a relatively low cost from a couple of hundred dollar to even free at some sites.

One very important thing about building links externally is to make sure you do not link spam.  What is link spam?  That’s when you post links to your site for the sole purpose of gaining a link in a post, comment etc.  While many of the blog’s out there now have rel=”nofollow” standard with all links there are still people that feel the need to spam it.  If you are going to go to a blog, or a forum try to make sure you add value.  First it gives people a reason why they might actually want to follow your link to see what you have to say.  So become a part of the community and not a spammer in the community.  It will give you credibility and a good chance of getting people to link to you because of the benefit you have shown them as an active part of the community.

You build good internal links to push your pagerank around, now you need to focus on building up your Internet reputation. How do you do this? How does Google say who’s important? Short answer it’s a popularity contest! Longer answer: It’s a popularity contest amongst peers.

So when you build links it’s important to build them from pages that make sense to be pointed too you.  So if you are a dog site, links from computer sites don’t help you too much.  So you need to find good sites that are in your niche and get links from them, also bigger sites with links into you are also helpful.  Now on those links if you are able to control the text that’s in the href use keywords that are important to you.  So instead of having <a hfref=”http://www.site.com”>site.com</a> do something like <a href=”http://www.site.com”>keyword</a>.

Also you should try to get your site into DMOZ and if you can afford it get it in Yahoo! directory.

As we mentioned your links need to look like they make sense or they won’t pass PR to you and could actually hurt you if the search engine see’s that you have a ton of unrelated links you will lose authority amongst your friends and will lose rankings.

So just make sure the links make sense to users and they’ll make sense to the engines.