Tag Archives: SEO Tools

Why Are XML Sitemaps Important

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What are XML sitemaps and why are SML sitemaps important to web sites and their owners? These are the two questions we will answer in this post. The first one is easy. Think of XML sitemaps as a road map for search engines to follow when they are exploring your site. It tells them the names of all of your pages, or posts. In addition, it shows where they are located on the server they reside in. Sitemaps tell the search engine when the post was updated. A sitemap can be in one of two categories. The first contains the information we just presented. The second is an XML sitemap containing a list of XML sitemaps. This file is an XML sitemap index. It points to all of the sitemaps for your website. Large websites use index files.

Why Are XML Sitemaps Important

These sitemaps point to all of the files, posts, and pages for a website. It is important to provide these roadmaps so that search engines who are indexing your site can find all of the pages quickly and easily. Without a sitemap, the search engines must rely on links within each page or post.

A search engine will not index these pages. They are not provided in search results to searchers. No one will ever find your site. You will not receive any traffic. Links are important. But so are sitemaps. Indexed the entire web site. They need to be included in search result rankings from Google and other search engines.

There are various apps available for WordPress and other content management systems. They can automatically scan your site and prepare a properly formatted XML Sitemap. They will even send it to the search engines for you.

Simplify SEO for Content Marketing

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Simplify SEO for Content MarketingContent is king and many bloggers and website owners are looking for ways to simplify SEO for content marketing. They want to add a lot of content that will be picked up by the search engines and ranked well. If they can make some money at it as well then so much the better. In some cases, bloggers are writing content for the sole purpose to generate income. So it becomes even more important than their content meets all SEO requirements as well as relevant for the reader. Turns out that there is a process to follow for generating content. If you follow a scientific business-like process you have a much better chance of being successful. Focus on quality, interesting material for the reader. Try to make sure your content will withstand the test of time.

Simplify SEO for Content Marketing – Process

Generate Ideas – The hardest part is coming up with an idea for a website and the corresponding posts that will be written. Competition is a factor, understanding what people are searching for and what kind of advertising will be generated on your site by systems such as Google Adsense. Once you have the idea, use Google’s Adwords keyword tool to help you pick titles.

Generate Blog Titles – with the tool mentioned above, you may receive over 800 possible combinations of titles and keyword topics. Use a spreadsheet to rank them in terms of search volume, competition, adword cost, etc to prioritize the list. Now that you have a prioritized list the next step is to do some research.

Research Your Topics – know your topic. Remember that you are writing original quality content that readers will find valuable, interesting, and worth spending their time on. Note that it must be high quality both for your users as well as the search engines.

Write your Story – practice proper writing techniques. Introduce the topic, deliver the details, and summarize the results. Your readers should find value. Use a grammatical and spell check engine. Well written posts are critical. Follow standard English spelling and grammar.

SEO Adaptation – Next you need to adapt your story for SEO. There are hundreds of parameters, but tools like WordPress SEO can help with assessing each post to ensure that it meets the basic SEO requirements.

Promote Your Content – on social media, share it, tweet it, etc. The more your material is shared the greater the chance that readers are going to see something they like. They may place orders etc and generate income for all of your efforts.