A sitemap can be a very powerful platform for SEO and I mean VERY powerful and yet it is so simple and often overlooked. Matt Cutts recently asked the question, which would he choose, an XML or HTML sitemap? He chose the HTML sitemap because both users and spiders can use the data. See the full video below:

Now the real benefit of having a good sitemap is the ability to make pages throughout a website accessible to the search engines. Most commonly great chunks of valuable content are hidden away in areas of a site which may seem to follow “SEO protocol”, in terms of URL structure and on page optimisation but for a search engine spider the content is hard to find.

An example of this would be on an e-commerce site whereby the structure follows homepage > category > sub category > products > content.  In the eyes of search engine spiders they have to crawl 4 levels before they can reach the juicy information/content and although Google are getting better at finding content (i.e. Caffeine) it can still help enormously by reducing the number of “obstacles” in their way. The theory is that by including a sitemap accessible from the homepage then Google will only have 1 “obstacle” to have to deal with before finding direct access to the rankable content.

Now to make a really effective sitemap for SEO it requires a little more methodology and architecture. It’s commonly thought that Google will take notice of at least 150 links on any one page before they start losing interest and move on to another area of a website. So for large websites that have thousands or even tens and thousands of pages it’s just not going to work including all your pages on one sitemap page.

So what’s the solution?

The most effective way to deal with high volume content websites is to create separate sitemaps for each website section. This deals with a few issues, firstly your main sitemap page will not go over the maximum number of links therefore all pages will be crawled and given value. Secondly the search engine spiders will still be able to access your deep content much easier than the normal way i.e. homepage > category etc.

The diagram below illustrates how a sitemap can be structured to ensure content can spidered.

For more information Rand explains well why this is an effective SEO technique:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-flat-site-architecture

For those of you thinking – how does this help increase my rankings? Well pages that were not previously indexed will now become listed therefore helping you rank for new terms. Acessibility really is the key here, internally and externally.

The final little treat for those of you that have taken the time to read the entire article; the anchor text used in a sitemap does seem to play an important part in terms of assigning value to those pages. This works on the same method as internal linking, assign keyword relevant descriptions to links in sitemaps and you will see better results than not doing so – tested and proved!

So the reason for my post is to share with you my observations from a recent batch of link building I completed. Most of you will probably already know what’s included but if you have a UK based client you may find this post has some value.

1. Domain Value – I have compiled a list of domain names based on results from link building and their direct effect on rankings for UK based sites:

Links from .ac.uk are similar to .edu links to our American friends and drive massive amounts of trust and authority. Links from .co.uk websites are also extremely valuable for link building in the UK, not only because of the localised domain but the content and language is usually more relevant. Surprising results show that .com links hold considerably less value than an equally matched .co.uk domain, when I say “less value” I mean less impact on UK search.

2. Anchor Text – A year or two ago I would have said keywords in anchor text is a must but I have to say there’s less weight on this factor than their use to be in the UK. I realise that Seomoz recently released the 2009 ranking factors but in the UK brand terms in links still deliver a very healthy amount of link juice which I’ve seen massive rankings boosts from. Although I must say this is based on domains no younger than 12 months old, any younger than that there would probably be a different outcome.

3. Negotiations – I’m going to start sounding rather old now but “back in the day” emailing webmasters for links worked well, generally because SEO was not really as widely known. However there is a misconception that this tactic will not work now due to the increase in web knowledge from website owners. Well let me tell you this is still the best method to build links anywhere, out of 40 emails sent to prospective sites I setup 15 links for free to sites including .gov and .ac.uk with an average PR of 4. Of course it’s all about finding the right sites but that’s the fun no?

4. Impact – This is kind of a gray area in the link building world, how long will it take my new shiny link to boost my rankings? Well usually it depends on when the bots crawl the link and add the update to the index, a good indicator of this was recently announced whereby it was mentioned Page Rank is a measure that is used to determine how often Google will visit a site. Essentially sites with a higher page rank will pass value to you quicker.

5. Directories – You can still get some great positive movement in rankings by identifying directories which are based or targeted for the UK. Firstly the domains are mostly .co.uk which provide good link juice and the content is often localised (which can bring in added benefits for local search). Admittedly the directories that hold the most value in the UK often have a review price but there are other gems out there if you look properly.

Since twitter has been snowballing in popularity more brands are quickly diving into the “twitter barrel” in hope for some kind of brand value to pour out. Lots of businesses are “doing twitter” just because someone sitting in a nice empty office at a top of a tall building says” it’s what everyone else is doing, why aren’t I?” I won’t get sidetracked and explain what I think a brand should do on twitter but I’ll quickly explain how “MoonFruit” and “Mpora” have influenced twitter in a major way.

Essentially MoonFruit and Mpora are both brands, they both came up with a simple idea to attract people to start tweeting (or posting) about their brand, in particular – their competition give-away. MoonFruit started first giving away a free Macbook Pro every day for 7 days straight, the rules and method of deployment were simple – twitter about the brand and include the tag #moonfruit. Everyday a winner would be selected at random from, method unknown, but probably looking through the twitter search engine somehow.   Being the first major contest like this to actually gather pace was probably down to the ease of entering, simply click on a button and you’ve entered, of course as well as notifying all your fellow friends about MoonFruit too.

MoonFruit got very big very quickly and actually topped the twitter trends for a while (even when Michael Jackson had recently died), however before the end of the competition the phrase #moonfruit was apparently removed by twitter or somehow sandboxed. Now although the competition was very popular the chance that they will ever be able to reach the top trends again looks unlikely, but like many I now know of the brand MoonFruit, so kudos.

Now my second case study is for a brand called Mpora who used the same strategy, I of course got hooked like many others by the chance to win, yet again, another Macbook Pro. However Mpora used a much more aggressive approach to the promotion which in my personal opinion has harmed their brand.

So, what did they do? In my eyes they got greedy, they started the competition like MoonFruit but quickly introduced the rule “more tweets gives you more chances to win”. They notified the winners at 5pm UK time every day, for the hours leading up to that point – Mpora would establish themselves in the top 10 most popular trends. However, like many I started getting minute by minute updates from Mpora themselves, pushing just about anything on their site to get as much traffic as possible. Very soon my twitter looked like the screenshot below:

The last thing I want in my twitter feed is for someone or some business to start spamming their services at me. So anyway, why has this harmed the brand? Well I for one got very bored, very quickly of seeing #mpora popping up everywhere – and although judging by traffic estimates from Alexa and Compete their campaign seems to have been a success. I wonder how many other people out there like me who quickly stopped following the brand during the competition and now consider them to be something to avoid in the future – food for thought.

The graph below shows an increase in traffic rankings in alexa while the competition was running:

The graph below clearly shows that the term #mpora was only popular at times near the result of the winners:

So no doubt there will have been some traffic being sent to both these sites but if brands continue to use such tactics to engage potential customers and increase brand visibility only bad things can happen (i.e. spam association).

However around the beginning of June 2009 the results in one particular high value industry (travel insurance) changed overnight to match the results seen in the USA back in February. Sites that had been in the top 10 for years all of a sudden have been forced into the depths of pages 2 and 3 being replaced with well known high street brands. I have collected some data which some of you may find interesting if you work in this industry, even if you don’t it’s worth taking note because this sort of activity seems to be spreading.

This first table shows a snap shot of the top 40 websites that rank under the term “travel insurance”, the results are compared from the start of June to the 6^th of July. A green arrow indicates a positive increase, red showing a negative drop and a green plus symbol indicating a new entry.

• Some sites worth mentioning:

• Post Office moving from position 12 to number 1

• Tesco’s moving from position 20 to number 7

• Essential Travel, Go Travel Insurance and more massively dropping

The next diagram actually shows the rankings over the last 5 months for the term “travel insurance”. In this diagram you can clearly see that this update has hugely effected the landscape in this industry.

I have heard this is happening for other financial terms too such as “car insurance” and Job related terms

The anchor text on any website is completely editable and can provide some great SEO value from inside a website and from external websites as well. Essentially the best practice to use in any situation is to provide the most accurate description of what the link destination is as possible. Use the image below as guidance, so for example “Johns Cars” website had 3 important pages about; car engines, types of wheels and cars for sale.

Now what’s important within the internal structure of Johns Cars is what kind of anchor text is used to link to these pages. What you should try and avoid in the setup of your navigation or links within content using unrelated anchor text to link to a page. Terms such as “click here” and “this link” don’t really provide any useful description of what’s at the destination or what users should expect.

If you provide a good description of a page explaining what users can accurately expect to see once they arrive at the link destination then you’re optimising your internal link structure successfully. By doing this you are letting the search engines know what’s on the page, making the destination more relevant to a page with just a “click here” link. See the diagram below to show how internal anchor texts should be used:

This type of method also applies to external links i.e. backlinks. In an ideal world you would aim to have hundreds or even thousands (depending how greedy you were) of links with accurate anchor texts pointing to your content. Google and the other search engines use the anchor text to help determine how useful pages are, and rank them accordingly (this is only a fraction of the ranking algorithm). The only problem is, you have no legitimate way of controlling what anchor text is used to point to your website. What we don’t really want again is phrases such as “this site” or “check this out” – although a link is a link and beggars can’t be choosers!

As the diagram indicates above although these links are pointing to Johns Cars they are not really providing any real added value in terms of anchor text. They are not telling the search engines or users what content should be expected on the website. Not to go too far into detail about getting the correct anchor texts as there are ways such as paid links and link bait but essentially any external links should ideally be keywords you are trying to rank for, so in Johns case, “Cars for sale”, “Types of wheels” and “Car engines”.

I ran my competitor reports this morning and have noticed page rank updates happening across the board.

I have noticed many increases and some decreases in some large brands. This will make it the second page rank of 2009 and the third page rank in nearly 6 months.

If you want to check your own page rank visit Dig Page Rank

Let me know what you guys find out

While many SEOs headed back to the drawing board to think up new and innovating ways to attract links to websites some SEOs have continued to play the paid links game. I’m not one to judge, if you buy links, there are risks, if the pros out way the cons then go for it. There are plenty of large brands out there who have more than obvious paid links strategy, yet never seem to receive any penalties, in fact they seem to get rewarded by great rankings.

I get questions from people and clients asking “is there a safe way to buy links?” well the short answer is no – but there are ways that websites seem to avoid detection which cut risks. From my analysis of competitors over the last 12 months there are methods which are used:

1. Link Brokers – These give you access to a selection of websites that are willing to sell text ads. Usually the system is automated, sellers place code on their sites allowing brokers to distribute links throughout networks. These seem to be the most obvious method that is identifiable by Google.

2. Unrelated content – If you buy links on a website that has no relevance to your own content then what value does this give the users? None. Organic or natural links more often than not will link to relevant content, providing added value to their website and the users that visit the links.

3. Anchor text – In an ideal world every link established naturally would contain keywords and phrases that you want to rank well for. Unfortunately this very rarely happens, natural link growth will include nofollow tags, banners, brand terms and a selection of utterly useless keywords such as “here” or “this website”.

4. Link relationships – Having 100% followed links with targeted keywords will undoubtedly set some Google alarm off somewhere. A natural link relationship look will have a selection of followed, nofollow, affiliate and tracking parameters.

5. Link increase – Something that is often overlooked by other SEOs is the natural versus manipulated link growth. A natural increase will be slow but generally consistent, with maybe a few spikes due to new content and site updates (which I believe Google checks). A manipulated increase will be quick with many spikes and even overall drops – people do forget to pay for their links. See the diagram below to show how a natural link increase usually looks and a blatantly obvious manipulation:

6. Link placement – A sure way to get found out for buying links is placing your link in the footer of a website where there are no other relevant links or too many external links. If you’re stupid enough to think doing this will give you any ranking value or traffic think again. Natural links usually get listed on resource pages, blogrolls, in blog posts (not paid) and perhaps the body of website copy.

7. Looking for Page Rank – It is true, people still search the high seas looking for page rank, alas this will do no good. Content and site relevance plays more of an important role these days than page rank in terms of obtaining high quality links. If a new website suddenly gets 10 page rank 5,6 and 7 links pointing to it then I fear its life in the Google index will be short lived.

At the end of the day as you can see trying to create a paid links strategy is a long, time consuming process which does hold risk. If you get away with it, you’ll achieve great rankings (which many top websites do) but the more rewarding ethical method is of course to create a linkable website with valuable content. Google will undoubtedly have 101 other paid link identifiers in their algorithm, plus they already have the option to report paid links in the Google webmaster console. If a linking opportunity arises be sure that you are within the Google guidelines to be safe.

I for one noticed this heavily in one of the industries I manage (travel related), every day one of 3 or 4 large brands would be shifted onto the homepage from the second or third page. This changed on a daily basis, giving these larger brands any position between 6 – 9.

Over the last week however it seems that this update has stopped dead. These brands are no longer being boosted to great positions for very highly searched phrases. I debated whether or not to mention this, part of me wants Google to have forgotten to switch the boost button on and the other part of me knows that updates in Google are as regular as minutes in the day.

Just my observations and would love to hear if any other SEO’s have seen the same?

It’s kind of obvious that having a targeted keyword in your domain name is going to help you in some respects in terms of rankings. However there are other indirect benefits of choosing a domain name with keywords included in them.

Natural links

These natural/organic/golden/mythical links which are generated over a long period of time are the ones Matt Cutt’s and Google say will bring the most value to any website. It just so happens I agree with them (lucky Google), however if you run a small to medium sized website they are often few and far between. Ideally you would hope that the anchor text given out of generosity would contain your desired keywords, however if your company/domain name does not contain any keywords then the likelihood of this happening is very small. If your domain name is keyword driven then guess what – you’ll probably get a bunch of desired anchor text links naturally.

Directory listings

Now it’s fairly easy to get into most directories, except a few high value ones which have certain criteria’s for listings. One such common listing must is that your website anchor text be your website or company name. Bad news for the majority of websites out there as you are probably losing a little bit of value by having your brand name as your anchor text. However if you have desired keywords in your website name then your anchor text is much more appropriate to the phrases you’re trying to target. Of course directory owners have the right to refuse your listing, but the majority which come with a sign up or review fee will gladly accept such a method.

Blog Links

As many of you will know or should do, the most common referrals in a blog posts are:

• Joe blogs at Website name

• Source: Website name

• Website Name

These phrases are generally used the most by bloggers (not necessarily SEO bloggers) to describe a finding online or to point to a recommended resource. So it really does pay to have keywords in your domain name as the amount of targeted natural links you will acquire will be much larger than if your domain/company name has no keywords associated with them.

1. House the content in an appropriate folder i.e. mycars.com/tyre-information/ – include keywords in your folder name that accurately represent what’s included inside
2. Make sure the pages are accessible from your HTML sitemap, this is important to help the pages get indexed quicker
3. List the files in your XML version of the sitemap
4. Make the content area accessible from your main navigation too, this will add the extra layer of visibility to your content area and show the search engines it’s valuable enough to warrant a link from your main menu.

Now the content itself will help your website’s performance for a number of keywords depending on the number of pages you add per strategy. However if there are particular pages on your site you’d prefer to rank better than others then make sure you use this next tip. Link to your targeted internal page in each new section of content. So highlight a relevant keyword in each page and create your link in the body of the text, this will directly pass most of the value and page rank to the targeted internal URL, boosting rankings for your already existing page. The diagram below shows how the value is passed between your new and existing pages

As mentioned this is a very simple strategy that does work with established websites to get new long tailed traffic and to help increase current web rankings.