Now about importance! Having the sitemap is not guarantee that your sub pages will be crawled and what is worse even indexed (if your site is not worth enough in the eyes of the search engines e.g. Google, then Google will index your site only until certain level of depth). However ensuring that your site have sitemap will secure indexing until certain depth when your site gets value and it will show you possible errors which robots encounter while indexing your site, so you can fix them.

Basically you will have indirect seo benefits, by ensuring that pages are getting indexed.

It’s better to be ranked somewhere then nowhere. But sitemap will not add value and improve your ranking against other indexed competitors.

Best benefits of sitemaps can be seen on new sites and large sites.

This Sulumits Retsambew site is using excellent Karailiev sitemap generator, plugin for Wordpress, but there are numerous scripts and tools around the net that are intended for generating sitemaps for various static or dynamic sites.

Here are basic steps for making your site sitemap compliant.

First step is installing appropriate script for your cms. You should point script to put sitemap in the root of your site so it can be easily accessed. For example www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

With only that done most of the search engines will eventually find your sitemap over time, but its always good thing to mention your sitemap link somewhere on the page.

Second step is to ensure your sitemap is ok and working. Register an account at Google Webmasters Tools, add your site and add your sitemap. After few days you will start to get data about how Google is using your sitemap and any error their crawler experience.

That’s about it. Feel free to suggest or notice me for possible errors of my understanding of sitemaps.

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What you need to watch when doing onpage seo optimization? I usually watch on things bellow. They are not mentioned by the priority, I always do them all.

Keywords. You can’t aim to be on first position on Google if you don’t have any targeted keyword mentioned on your site. You need to have keywords in your meta tags, title, then h1, h2 tags… Don’t bother yourself with keyword density. Just read the text aloud and until it gets awkward you don’t have too much keywords.

Title. Put your keywords in title tag. Consider that closer the keywords to the beginning of the Title tag, the higher the relevancy. Don’t have more pages with same title; just one page is optimized for one keyword. Don’t put bunch of keywords randomly into Title. Everything must have sense.

Meta. Don’t ignore meta tags just because search engine tell you that they don’t use them anymore. They are important. Play by the rules. Every page of your site must have different and appropriate meta tags, same as title. It is best that each of your pages have unique meta description.

Heading tags. Smartly use your heading tags. Don’t put more then one h1 tag on your page. You can have more H2 and lower tags… Use the heading tags on this way for example…

You get the picture?

Content. Insert you keywords in content text, insert the keyword in first paragraph, but don’t use too much keywords. Your site is for people not robots. Check first section of this blogpost under Keywords. Write quality and original content. Don’t steal from other. You will just get duplicated content penalty from Google.

Images. Put images in content to accompany your texts. Describe image with keywords by entering them in the alt.

Internal linking. Link internal pages in articles with anchor text. Link similar content. All your internal pages will get some rank, so it is useful to link from them to your other relevant page…

Friendly URL. Activate friendly URLs in your CMS (mod rewrite). Try to keep them simple without bunch of „/“delimiting everything.

Decide what you will use. Your site with www. or without www, and then do 301 redirection (with .htaccess) according to your choice.

External linking. Begin to use nofollow tag on external, but also on internal links. If you don’t know what is nofollow then find out here. Every paid link, sponsor link, every page you think that there is no need to be indexed (Privacy Policy), every untrusted link (comments) should be under rel=”nofollow” tag. Don’t link to spam sites. Link only to trusted content.

Use valid code. Many people think that this is not important. I like to think it is. At least that it brings you some small percent. If no other good, you will be at least sure that non valid code is stopping robots to index your site.

Put rss, sitemap and favicon into your sites. This will make your page more professional and more serious.

Don’t know what more to say. Just make site logically, and for people.

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How these SERPs are generated?

They are generated according to relevance and page worth in search engine eyes. Algorithms for determining page relevancy are almost always well kept secret. But if you stick with this formula you can’t fail:

Good original content + healthy and good links = Good position.

This means that you need to write content for people, not search engines. Good original content will give you visitors, visitors will spread word about you and they will help you to get healthy and good links. Bunch of links will mean that people talk about you, and that will give you worth and authority in the search engine eyes.

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