Most website administrators create a site map, but do they actually know why they do this?  There are two main reason for creating a site map and both of them entail completely different forms.

Firstly, there is the site map for the customer, that helps them navigate around your website.  This usually takes the form of hyperlinks and sometimes even a short excerpt about each page.  The link to this site map usually appear somewhere around the website footer.

The second type is the one that we generate to tell search engines about our site.  These contain elements that can significantly assist search engines in cataloging your website and therefore your sites performance in search engines rankings.

Site maps should firstly be generated in XML.  These can at a later date be changed to an RSS or Atom feed which will tell search engines when URLs are added without having to go back and resubmit your site map all the time, but initially you want Google to know of all your pages and a feed will only give the recent URLs.  The alternative options is a straight text file (.txt) but I am not a huge fan of this as it allows only one URL per line and misses all the frequency and priority information.

An example XML site map would look like this:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-9″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www,sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>http://xebidy.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2008-04-22</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.9</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

The two most interesting tags are the frequency and priority tags.  The frequency tells a search engine how often the content of the pages is likely (not necessarily exactly) to change.  The different options are:

• Always
• Hourly
• Daily
• Weekly
• Monthly
• Yearly
• Never

An important point is that although you are only indicating the likely frequency of your page updates you should be as accurate as possible.  If you state that your content is updated weekly and search engines consider this information when setting their index stats for your site and it is not the case then the search engines may not return to those pages even monthly, meaning you could go for some time without getting your fresh content indexed.

The priority tag allows you to set a relative value of between 0.0 and 1.0 for each page.  Unfortunately it is unlikely that the priority you assign to a page will effect the order in which your pages appear in the search engines (as we know there are many other factors that influence that) however it does tell search engines the order of importance of your pages as you deem them.  It will help search engines to determine which pages in your site to index first and it will increase the likelihood of your most important pages appearing in the search databases.  Finally an important point is that you will not gain anything by setting all your pages priorities high as the priority is relative to the other pages on your site so your important pages wont be considered over the others.

Once you have created your site map the next step is to advise search engines of its existence.  In Google this is easy, you simply submit the site map through the webmasters interface - this is certainly the best way.  Alternatively, you can specify the location of the site map into the robots.txt file - this is a good method for when using an RSS for your site map.  Ideally you should do both.

For more information on site maps check out sitemaps.org

Heres’ an issue that everyone faces as more resellers of products appear on the Internet - the issue of duplicate content.

Say you write great content for your website, but then you share that content with all your main affiliates or suppliers, for example, a hostel might give the same content they use on their home page to Hostel World or a tour company might do this for STA Travel, what will Google and other search engines think when they see the same content?

We know that duplicate content is frowned on and we know that those sites that have plagarised content are devalued by Google in the search results rankings even to the point of being banned for sometime. The risk is that by supplying the same copy to your partners you are in fact risking having your content considered as duplicate content and having your own site devalued.

For example, Hostel World, STA, eBookers and so on are always going to be considered more authoritative websites than your own - they have thousands of pages, thousands of links and are good quality sites. They probably have higher page rank than you too. So, when Google reads your content on their site it is highly likely that Google may interpret that content as theirs and penalise you for copying them. Now thats’ not on!

What about if some of these sites even pay for cost-per-click ads on your name. Well it is surely not a bad thing if you are say Base Backpackers and STA Travel are promoting your brand in the search results so as they sell more of your products is it? Perhaps it is. After all the sale always has a cost of commission. If you are coming up in the search engines number one for your brand you are hoping that you will secure the sale yourself - thereby paying back the investment you have made in web marketing and getting that amazing site. You don’t want to be giving away revenue for someone else trading on your name without actually doing anything for themselves.

These are interesting conundrums for the travel (and other industries). Perhaps it is time to turn against the hands that have fed us for so long, the STA Travels, the Hostel Worlds and so on. When it comes to the web you are all on an even footing and perhaps you are right to say no to large commissions and demand that these companies produce their own content about your product or even not trade on your name in the search engines.

An interesting email came across my desk the other day about some well-known guys in Australia that have been launching a number of new sites promoting Northern Territory travel.

The interesting point pertained to how long a new URL exists before it gets’ any decent Google rankings. Our URL at Xebidy has only be going since February and we have only just gone up to page rank one after the recent Google page rank shuffle. Not exactly a meteoric rise - but it is not something we ever working on.

The interesting thing was that these guys had given themselves at least 8 months, citing the middle of next year to be when they would start to be up the rankings. I personally was a bit surprised by this speed - a bit quick in my opinion. But these guys are good and they do have a huge amount of websites to leverage off.

Then again we also know that Google looks for sites owned or operated by the same web masters etc and discounts the value of their links etc. So perhaps they are being optimistic. I am intrigued to watch.

It is of more interest for my own two pet projects, Breathe and Travel Generation. Both are new URLs and both are due to be launched early in 2008. How long will they take to have any impact on the search engine rankings? 12 months perhaps.

Best we follow out own advice and start comprehensive Internet Marketing now!

I sound like a broken record as I harp on about the importance of links, but I just want to clarify some very important issues with links that have been effecting so many of your web rankings in the past few months. Many sites have seen a decline in their search engine rankings - yet they have lots and lots of links, why?

As I said in a post last month about the Importance of Links Google has long disapproved of reciprocal links and now they have pounced “bad neighbourhood” links and buying links.

A bad neighbourhood is formed when you have lots of links from sites that have nothing to do with your sites content. Links from fashion websites, car sales, even shoe websites pointing to your hotel or travel site. Google simply sees right through this and simply not counting these links. It has not been established as yet whether your site is also being penalised for actually having these links. Likewise, listing you site on link farms (sites that serve no other purpose than creating links), or the most recent fad of three-way link schemes are definitely heavy frowned upon - they are simply cheating!

Worse, for hostels that have got themselves listed in such sites, I foresee it is going to be one hell of a battle to get yourselves removed.
Also in a post last month I introduced you to a cool tool for looking to the anchor text links of your competitors for your selected keywords. The anchor and title texts in the links to your website are very important. As part of the clampdown on rogue linking Google is placing much greater emphasis on the relationship between the content on your site and the content on the sites linking to you. One of the main methods for doing this is by looking at the title and anchor text in the links. The back link tool I gave you earlier this week is the first place to start in analysing your links and those of your competitors to establish the value of these.

Since Google has introduced these changes many established sites have seen themselves fall down the ratings. On the flip side the opportunity exists for you to improve your rankings now.

Following my rant last week regarding the amount of work involved in SEO and companies that charge just $99 per month I have been inundated with queries regarding just what is Optimisation (as opposed to Internet Marketing as expressed in my post). See my post here. So, I thought it prudent to give brief summary of some of the elements I consider to fall into the on-site optimisation category.

1. Keywords and content

I have discussed before (see relevant posts here) some of the methods of researching keywords and the importance of selecting the right keywords for your website. The goal is to generate more and better quality traffic to your website. The rule is to focus on 5 to 8 keyword phrases. Your chosen keywords should be contained within the main content generously. The ideal situation is to have your main keywords at the beginning of the page and toward the end of the page. Keywords can also be made bold to emphasise them as long as this is done liberally. The most important rule however about keywords relative to the content is that the content must make sense to the reader (see my earlier posts on The Art of Writing Web Content).

2. Image Optimisation

Images should be labelled with your keywords and the alt text used to clearly identify the image using where possible your keywords. Alt text enables web readers with disabilities to have the image described to them. Search engines can’t view images either and so use the alt text to build up their database of information regarding your site. Using keywords in your alt text helps search engines build up a “picture” of your website.

3. Meta data

The use of meta data in the web page head is believed to influence search engine rankings less and less. However, there is some minimum data that should be supplied; including the author of the website, the date the website was created, the type of content (whether it is general or adult), and a description of the website. One of the biggest mistakes in meta data is to stuff lots and lots of keywords into both the keyword meta tag and the description meta tag. At the most the description and keywords should be about 250 characters long each. The text in the description meta tag may also appear in the search results so consider these carefully.

4. Title and heading tags

Earlier this month I posted a piece on the importance of links in which I discussed how a search engine page rank algorithm mimics the concept of referencing other published articles in a scientific journal or similar. As an extension of this concept search engines place weight to the structure of the document. The title of the web page therefore being considered the most important - that which draws the reader in and is most often referenced. Subsequent headings are given weight at a diminishing rate. Using your keywords in your titles tells the search engines that your keywords are important to the overall theme of your website.

5. Other optimisation techniques

There are other factors which are perhaps the most important. These mainly centre on the physical code of your website. Ensure, firstly, that search engines can index your website thoroughly. Search engines can not navigate flash (and many can not even read the content) or other fancy dynamic menus, therefore, ensure that all pages within your website can be reached through simple text based links. Text based links describe the purpose of the link better to search engines than image links (and once again you should use your keywords here). Moreover, search engines will deprecate the value of your website if they find dead links - that is, links that don’t go anywhere. Likewise, search engines do not like dynamic URL’s nor URL structures that are heavily deep in folder structures. The reason is that search engine programmers fear the search engine spider may become trapped within the website URL structure linking round and round within the site. Websites containing deep folder navigations and long dynamic URL’s (those usually containing the question mark) are often abandoned by search engines before the whole site has been indexed.

Finally, this is probably one of the least talked about elements and one of the most interesting for us at Xebidy. There are a few rules that should be applied to the development of all websites to make the search engine ready. One of the most important ones is the code to content ratio. In my opinion sites should be developed in CSS as much as possible thereby removing any formatting code from the actual web page and storing it in a separate file. Likewise any Javascript code for menus etc should be stored in a separate file. Code order can also be used to advantage. As I said before the higher that keywords appear in your content the greater weight they are given by search engines. If you main content appears higher up the coded page the more important it will be viewed by search engines. In this way if menus etc. exist in the left hand columns techniques such as relative and absolute positioning and floating the divs left and right can be used to not render the website correctly on screen without necessarily coding in strict chronological order.

These are just some of the main techniques we would use in getting your website ready for a search engine to visit and therefore index. However, as I clearly stated in last week’s rant these are only the start of any effort to increase search engine rankings and are certainly not sufficient to guarantee high rankings - nor maintain them!

Following last weeks post regarding the importance of owning the user experience in the Web 2.0 era the question arose on whether search engines will in fact continue to be relevant into the future?

Two factors will ensure that the role of search engines will expand over time:

• The fragmentation of travel inventory; very few travel suppliers sell more than their own products through their websites.
• The low cost of search for the user: pragmatism is still a greater force then loyalty. Nearly one-half of online travel consumers will compare more than 2 air and hotel travel providers when they book their next trip. Brand loyalty remains on the critical list – less than 23% of North American leisure travellers view themselves as brand loyal when buying leisure travel.

As the role of search engines continues to grow in dominance so to does the spending on paid listings (the results that appear on the right hand column of a Google search) rise. Paradoxically, the return on investment of these marketing campaigns is declining and will so more and more, as more travel suppliers enter the search bidding process. Greater appreciation of analytics will also drive a greater understanding of the keywords that generate business and therefore a greater pressure on search results and the cost per click of advertising.

The only solution is to invest more heavily in sustainable search engine initiatives, which, when done right, will have a longer term impact on your organic search engine rankings and hence sales on a more profitable basis. All businesses should be striving to developer richer user experiences that make the most of available data to build up a sustainable competitive advantage over the rankings positions of their competitors.

We knew it was coming but here it is today!!

Google has released it’s uber search engine, combining news, videos, images and other related results into the search results. What will the mean for those with good (or bad) search results. I have checked a number of search results for some of the keywords my clients work with and in the majority most seem relatively unaffected at this stage. However, we will research it over the day and during the weekend to gauge the full extent of the impact.

One thing it will mean is the importance of including richer media such as images and videos into your websites. More soon…