SEO is short for search engine optimisation and is the process of modifying a website so that it can be indexed better by the search engines. The primary objective of an SEO campaign is to have the website appearing higher in the listings of the search engines pages.
Search engines like Google and many others maintain huge volumes of cached data in their index. To do this they have devised their own web crawler, also known as a robot or spider. This rather clever script continuously surfs the web and hunts out new content, the spider reads every word, follows every link and is relentless in its task. The information and pages that the spider finds and retrieves are subsequently cached and indexed according to the content and text found on that page. More weight is given to certain page elements such as titles and paragraph headings. As well as taking into account the text of the titles and headers many search engines compile and index lists of keywords, their frequency and other related factors for each page to be used in their ranking algorithms.
An extremely effective method of SEO is the creation of a sitemap on a website. This sitemap will then be linked to from the homepage to make it simple and easy for the spiders to locate and navigate around the site. The easier is it to navigate the easier it is to index the keywords and content for the entire site. This is why a SEO sitemap is of great benefit and importance to a website owner.
A typical sitemap is not a complicated entity; instead it is simple just a page of links. These links are displayed on screen in a table or list form with a list being the most visually appealing option. The code for an SEO sitemap is not complicated at all and involves just basic html knowledge. This makes them quick to employ, and simple to update and maintain. A common layout would be a list of all the categories and sections with a short description for each category with the text in the link to each categories page being the actual title of the page it is pointing to.
Using the list layout can also help to reduce superfluous tags that could possibly mask your keywords from the search engines. The search engines spiders and bots give more weight to the following elements of a webpage, the text contained in headings and titles, the text in the anchor of link elements and the text nearer to the top of the page. Therefore, by making sure your keywords appear and are present in these places can only assist a site potential for moving up the search engines.
It should be remembered that SEO is not an exact science and there is no way to guarantee where a website will show in the ranking of search results. That said, a SEO sitemap properly implemented be used to give a site its best possible chance and give the edge over the competition. Regular monitoring, adjustment and fine tuning of the SEO Sitemap would ensure that a website keeps any current ranking and increases the prospects and subsequently traffic for a new site.
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