Articles - SEO and UXO guide contents - website security

Links

Incoming links are considered the Holy Grail for websites since Google introduced the PageRank algorithm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank) but don’t think for a moment that this is the only measure that Google uses to rank websites: they haven’t been spending money on all those bright young PhDs for nothing.

Links are only one way that search engines find your website

– and don’t assume that it’s necessarily the most important

Search engines are parsimonious with information about how their algorithms work, but we can make intelligent guesses from the tools and services that they have on offer.

Toolbars from Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask and their like can track every page visited and send the data back to head office, so not only are they checking the pages, they are tracking visitor behaviour around your site.

If you use Google Analytics then Google have yet another way of tracking visitors around your site even if they haven’t got a search toolbar installed.

So while links are important, they are not everything.

XML sitemaps

XML sitemaps are a formalised way of showing the existence of all the pages of your website, including those that may not be easily discovered through a normal crawling process.

The protocol for XML sitemaps is defined at www.sitemaps.org but the way that most webmasters generate a sitemap is to go online and use a free Google sitemap generator and download the result – usually called sitemap.xml – into their website.

Below is an extract showing the form that an XML sitemap takes:

<url>

<loc>http://www.replace-this.co.uk/</loc>

<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>

<priority>1.00</priority>

</url>

<url>

<loc>http://www.replace-this.co.uk/catalogue.aspx</loc>

<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>

<priority>0.80</priority>

</url>

<url>

<loc>http://www.replace-this.co.uk/contact-us.aspx</loc>

<priority>0.40</priority>

</url>

An uncompressed XML sitemap can be inspected using a text editor like Notepad, Notepad++ or TextEdit. You should always check an XML sitemap to ensure that you see what you expect to see and also verify that there is only a single entry for the default document eg if your default document is index.htm or default.asp or home.php, that address should not appear in the sitemap. There are other places where you may find that pages have been erroneously duplicated and you may want to fix that too.

You can optionally set the priority of the pages within the sitemap - the default value if not specified is 0.5. Don’t be tempted to set them all to the max (1.0) because the priority is only relative to your website.

The changefreq (a hint of how often the page content is likely to change) can also be set, but setting it to always or hourly is not going to make any difference unless you are the BBC.

You will need to reference the XML sitemap, just like the geo-sitemap, in the robots.txt file and the method is the same as in the page on geo-location.

Be aware that search engines say they only use XML sitemaps as a hint, not as the definitive answer. This is probably sensible because, unless automated, most webmasters won’t be keeping the sitemap up to date.

If you link to someone else’s website, ask for a reciprocal link where feasible

Equally, anyone with a website that’s been up for any length of time will be approached for reciprocal links. You should judge this entirely on whether it will bring benefits to your visitors.

Tempting though they may be, links that provide negligible benefit to your visitors should be avoided. They could impact negatively on your ranking.

Be useful in forums and include your website address in your forum signature

Nobody will begrudge you links from forums if you are genuinely useful within them.

For maximum SEO benefit, choose active forums that have a good ranking. Answering people’s questions will probably require a lot of commitment and work and so you may want to do it as a time-limited campaign.