Search Engine Optimization for Site Owners and Small Businesses

Sitemaps can be of two kinds; a page or pages on your site that lists the pages on your website, often hierarchically organized or ‘Google Sitemaps’ which is a process that allows site owners to submit urls of pages they would like to have included in Google’s index. The two kinds of sitemap serve slightly different purposes, both important.

A conventional sitemap is designed to help the human visitor if they can’t find what they are looking for and also to ensure that Googlebot (Google’s Web Crawler) finds the important pages of your site. A well executed example of this kind of sitemap is Apple’s sitemap. From the optimization point of view a page like this presents an opportunity to link to your own pages with appropriate anchor text (see the last paragraph of Internal Links). If you have more than a few pages on your site then a sitemap can only be advantageous.

Google Sitemaps however is a solution to a problem that Google has with crawling the entire web. Googlebot spends a lot of time and resources fetching pages that have not changed since it last looked at them. Crawling billions of pages to find that the majority are the same as last time is not very efficient and Google Sitemaps has been designed to improve the process. The idea is that site owners submit a sitemap to Google and next time Googlebot visits their site it knows where to go and look for changed or new pages.

If site owners use Google Sitemaps it will reduce their machine time and reduce their bandwidth i.e. it saves them money. Also site owners get their new content indexed quicker and a reduced load on their servers by Googlebot not fetching unchanged pages. Google have provided a sitemap protocol and an automated process for the whole procedure.

Google Sitemaps does not replace the established Googlebot crawling procedure and should be used to solve specific problems, such as:

Google have an extensive help and explanation of the procedure at About Google Sitemaps.

August 5, 2006

Google has renamed Google Sitemaps to Google Webmaster Tools under the new heading of Webmaster Central.

April 15, 2007

Google, MSN, Yahoo and ASK have recently announced support for sitemap auto-discovery via the robots.txt file and have agreed on a standard sitemaps protocol.

By adding the following line of code to your robots.txt file the search engines will now auto-discover your sitemap file.

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

“There came a blinding flash, a deafening roar,
And dissonant cries of triumph and dismay”.
Lines from “The Volunteer” by Elbridge Cutler, 1831–1870.

Triumph and dismay are two feelings Flash designers know well. The triumph comes with mastering a rich diversity of features in a difficult technology and producing a visually appealing result. The dismay comes when the SEO wants to remove the Flash components from the website they have just designed!

Initially a simple tool for delivering low bandwidth animations over the Web Flash has evolved into a platform for delivering complex applications and rich media content. Now Flash is able to deliver far more than animations or short video clips.

Flash has become the delivery mechanism of choice for educational and complex business applications. Universities use Flash to great effect for delivering entire lectures with quizzes and assessments in real-time. In commerce Flash is used for everything from cattle auctions to virtual laboratory experiments.

However its use on websites has declined and there are two reasons for this. Firstly every usability study ever done shows that web surfers dislike Flash intensely, particularly Flash intros. Secondly Flash is a visual experience and search engine robots are blind, which means the SEO of Flash sites is problematical. Sites designed around Flash or with Flash intros and Flash navigation are often developed at the request of clients who do not know any better and the developers have not sought to educate them.

Take for example the following site that is completely built in Flash. Although there are several pages of information, because the navigation and the content are all in Flash the search engines are only aware of one page. Here it is in a reduced size window.
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“The first hope of a painter who feels hopeful about painting is the hope that the painting will move, that it will live outside its frame”, Gertrude Stein (1874 - 1946).

Much like Gertrude Stein’s painter, web designers have hopes for their framed web designs but are very often disappointed. This is because framed websites do not fit the conceptual model of the web where every page corresponds to a single URL. Consequently designers must use a variety of tricks to overcome the disadvantages and if you miss a trick there can be unpleasant results.

Designers’ intent on using frames may use the NOFRAMES element which can be used to provide alternative content. However not the useless alternative content provided by so many designers such as “This site requires the use of frames” or “Your browser does not support Frames” which is a great way to prevent your website being found on a search engine. The correct use of NOFRAMES is described in the W3C document Frames in HTML documents.

Apart from having to provide alternative content the other major problem is what happens if a search engine query matches an individual frame on a page? The search engine simply returns the URL for that frame and if a user clicks the link then the page will not be displayed in a frame because there will be no frame set corresponding to that URL. Designers get round this by detecting when a content page is trying to display outside its frameset and redirecting to either the home page or to a framed page that loads the orphan into an alternative frameset. If you really want to know how to do this you can read a description of the technique using JavaScript in Give orphan pages a home.

Also framed sites have a problem with obtaining inbound links because it is not easy for someone to link to one of the content pages. Either they must link to the home page and give directions to the page they want to point to or they must bypass the frame arrangement. If it’s not easy to link then only the very determined will be prepared to go to the trouble of doing so.

If you want the framed look but don’t want the problems you can achieve it through cascading style sheets. Stu Nicholls has an excellent example on his website CSS Play (and there are lots of other interesting experiments with cascading style sheets on Stu’s site).

The bottom line is this, if your web designer uses Frames seek a better and more experienced designer and if you find Framed sites attractive in spite of the problems ask yourself why your competitors do not use them.

Using submission software is a very bad mistake made by a small minority of site owners. Tempted by sales copy that promises to “Submit Your website to more than 1.2 Million Search Engines, Directories and Link pages” they pay for software that is completely unnecessary and in most cases will have a negative effect.

In practice there are only a handful of search engines that people use and all of those have robots that spider the web looking for new pages and sites. There is absolutely no need to submit your pages to these search engines because they will find you quite quickly if you have a link from at least one site that is in their index already. Of course you should have a lot more than one inbound link!

The disadvantages of using such software is that most of the sites they submit to are there only to collect your email address and then make it available to spammers. So when you purchase the software you are in effect paying to be spammed which is not a good way to spend money.

Here is a section of a page from a site that sells this kind of submission software:
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Hidden text is text which is embedded in the html code and seen by the search engines but not seen by website visitors. Those that use hidden text believe that it can improve their page’s ranking and in some cases it may well appear to do so but the effect is very small.

It is quite easy to hide text as we shall see but all the major search engines advise strongly against doing so, because it reduces the quality of their results. Search engines can detect certain forms of hidden text algorithmically and when they do they will automatically drop the offending site from their index. It is because the search engines regard hidden text as spam and are getting better at detecting it every day that hiding text is a low reward high risk strategy and one never used by professional SEO’s.

The first kind of hidden text is not so much hidden as ignored. This is text placed between comment tags like this <!–This text is a comment–>. Comment tags are actually intended to be used as an aid to whoever is editing the source code at a later date and as such comments are not of course displayed in the browser. Here is a real life example of comment tag spam:
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