SEO|The Full Insider SEO Details Exposed

I have been on the Internet for a long time. At least I have been doing marketing a long time in relation to the Internet as a commercial entity.

Around the end of 1995 I speculated in domain names, learning about keywords and phrases and how they help the search engines find the content you are providing at your website.

I continued to learn about keywords and as search engine optimization became a necessity I was ready to use what I had learned about keywords and phrases, domain names, search engines and content.

There were quite a few people, say a couple of hundred who really knew how to use keywords to optimize websites.

However, then it was to help search engines do a better job of indexing all of the content on the web. Now it seems the roles are reversed and the search engines are in charge. At least many seem to think so.

Now there are also a lot of people, thousands, who claim to know all of the search engine secrets and some claim they can get you top listings if you just sign up with them, buy their Ebooks, buy their videos, or buy their software.

I always have a hard time with the math. If these guys can guarantee you a top 10 listing for your keywords, then 11 companies sign up for their service that are also targeting your keywords or phrases, then how do they get all 11 customers a top 10 listing?

There are a lot of things we have known about the importance of for years such as anchor text, titles for links, surrounding links with keywords in the body text to make the links more relative, alt tags, metatags, keyword count, and more.

But now almost every day I see a website or article promoting a new search engine secret and it has a name I have never heard of. Then when I investigate and read up on it I find that they have renamed anchor text something else, keyword-count something else, etc.

Just like Hollywood these days seem to only be remaking movies we have already seen and giving them new names, it seems there are a lot of people out there now renaming SEO methods that are as old as the Internet with new names and selling them as new secrets.

They sell you these new secrets on video, in an Ebook, in a Seminar, or produce software that optimizes your website for you.

Most of the SEO Gurus of today never actually optimized a website for themselves or anyone else with any good results. They simply advertised to other people that they know how to make them rich in 90 days with little or no work at all and can promise you top 10 search engine rank in all the major search engines.

There are some of us who actually do the work and will keep on doing so and remaining ethical about the business. Its just hard to sit by and see so many people bilked out of their money with promises that no one can keep.

I have clients send me stuff all the time.

Hey look at this new SEO technique I got in my email!

“Look at this website I found that can get us top listings in 30 days!

I go and read up on it for my client and find the same old stuff repackaged once again. Things I am already doing for the client is now a video or an Ebook and they cannot understand why I would recommend not spending money on it.

If you are going into business on the web and you read this article, just learn one thing from it.

There are NO shortcuts to success. Get rich quick schemes are just schemes. There is no magic formula or secret to getting top listings in the major search engines.

If there is a secret, it is that it actually requires hard work to be successful on the web just like it takes hard work to become successful with any business on or offline.

Buying an Ebook or a video or some software is not going to make you rich or get you top listings in the search engines. Anyone who tells you that work is not required to make money on the web is lying to you.

Learn how to do this for yourself or hire a professional who does not promise you the sky, but also hire one that can prove the results they have gotten for clients and for their own websites.

Testimonials are worth absolutely nothing.

Chris McElroy is amazing! He got me a top 10 listing for my website in less than thirty days! The videos are easy to follow and in just days I was an SEO expert. I recommend everyone buy his Ebooks too! -John Doe, New York

Now dont you just want to run right out and buy my video? Too bad I dont have one to sell.

Nope, no Ebooks either.

No Software to make you rich.

But I can do the search engine optimization and promotion for your website and prove the results with weekly increases in link popularity and search engine indexing.

Google has implemented a cutting edge method of crawling web site for its search engine index. This unprecedented method of indexing web pages is known as Google Sitemaps, and it is quickly growing in popularity among webmasters and SEO agents and managers due to its ability to get entire web site indexed quickly and to pick up errors in the links coming into and out of these web site.

Google Sitemaps consists of placing the URLs of your pages along with important information regarding how Google should index them into an XML document. This information is then read by the Google Spider and the pages are normally indexed quite quickly assuming that they are coherent to Google’s standards for indexing pages (and also assuming that the sitemaps conform to Googles Sitemap Criteria which will be explained a little later).

There are two primary types of Google Sitemaps. The first is a list of pages in a website and the second is a list of sitemaps in the website. Google has limited the number of URLs in its sitemaps to fifty thousand URLs. This may sound like a lot, but for some of the more intricate web site, fifty thousand URLs may not even make a dent in what they want indexed.

This led to the advent of the Google Sitemap index file which can index up to one thousand sitemaps. If you do the math, this means that you could have one thousand sitemaps with up to fifty thousand URLs in each sitemap which allows for fifty million URLs to be placed in your Google Sitemap scheme. But wait, there’s more. Who ever said that you can’t have an index of indexes? You could actually make an index of a thousand index files which are all indexes of a thousand index files. Basically, there is no limit to the number of URLs that you can hold in your Google sitemaps.

Now that you understand the power of the Google Sitemap you’re probably asking yourself how to create and implement a Google Sitemap. The first step is to simply create your sitemaps. Here are the templates which are also available at http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/

For a sitemap file use the following format:

http://www.example.com/

2005-01-01

monthly

http://www.example.com/catalog?item=12&desc=vacation_hawaii

weekly

http://www.example.com/catalog?item=73&desc=vacation_new_zealand

2004-12-23

weekly

http://www.example.com/catalog?item=74&desc=vacation_newfoundland

2004-12-23T18:00:15+00:00

http://www.example.com/catalog?item=83&desc=vacation_usa

2004-11-23

Everything here is pretty self-explanatory with the exception of the changefreq and the priority aspects. The changefreq asks how often you think the page will change on average. The possible values for the changefreq option are: always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and never. The priority aspect basically just asks how important the particular page is in your website. The value can be anywhere between 0.0 and 1.0. If you decide not to specify a priority it will default to 0.5.

To create a sitemap index file follow the following format:

http://www.example.com/sitemap1.xml.gz

2004-10-01T18:23:17+00:00

http://www.example.com/sitemap2.xml.gz

2005-01-01

This is all pretty straight forward but it leads me to my next point. You notice that the file names all end in .gz. Google allows you to compress your sitemaps so that they take up less of your disk space when you place them on your site and less of your band width when Google downloads them (which it seems to do approximately once every 9 hours or so). You may only use .gz compression. If you try .zip, it won’t work.

Now all that you really have to do is submit your sitemap to google. In order to do this you must go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login and log into your Google account. If you don’t have a Google account, you can create one. Once you log in you will be allowed to submit your sitemap into the google index. At some point within about 24 hours of your submission, Google will give you the option to place a small HTML file onto your website so that it can confirm that you do, indeed, have access to editing the site. Once you have done this it will begin to provide you with statistics regarding your google sitemap. (Note that even without this feature you can see when google downloaded the sitemap last and what the status of the sitemap was at that time.)

How Google Sitemaps Fits Into Search Engine Optimization.

According to Google, the Sitemaps utility is free and will continue to be yet its almost as good as the paid inclusion service offered by rival search engines. So how can you take advantage of this great service?

First of all, you should create a Google Account. Although you can still use Google Sitemaps without an account, you need one before you can use Googles tools to check your site submissions. Once you do that and go to sitemaps.google.com, youll be guided through the process.

Google Sitemaps has a very helpful question and answer page that will give you the help you need the answers to most questions people have can be found right there. Good luck!