Recently, we had a new client that came to us that had a nice website already that we couldn’t complain about, several pages of well written content, and hundreds of pictures of the projects they had done already.  Our first thought…nice.  Good start.  We’ll be honest – there’s something really fun about being able to do the initial optimization of a website.  Getting a screenshot of the beginning traffic, comparing it as it moves along…sorry, to get back on topic.

So we know some of the basic steps of optimizing a site:

  • Meta title, descriptions, and maybe keywords (if you believe that it could have a 0.01% impact, just to give you a little boost)
  • Ease of navigation through some internal linking
  • Analysis of keyword stuffing and insertion
  • Loadtime adjustments and seeing if site speed can be increased from management of JS, plugins, PHP, server status, image sizes, etc etc
  • SITEMAP

There’s more, but let’s focus on the sitemap.  In general terms, a sitemap is a “go to” for letting search engines know about the expanse of your site.  These can be manually submitted to search engines or placed in a manner where they are easily accessible (such as yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml).  We don’t liking leaving things up to chance, so we submitted it ourselves.  Even though the site had had one, who is to know what the process was for the previous webmaster.

So we know that some changes to SEO can take some time, but what about a search engine now knowing that your site has more than 0 pages?  See below. (click to expand)

 

Pretty good correlation.  Now they’re ranking for keywords that include their services and not just their brand name.

What is one of the easiest ways to submit a sitemap?  We like doing it this way:

Go to this website and enter your url and follow directions.  We select frequency as “always”.

When it is time to save, make sure it is saved as an “xml”.  Ask your webmaster then to upload it to the root of your server where your domain is hosted (if you know how to do this. good for you).  This is one good placement.

Make sure you do it through Google Webmaster Tools next.  This is under “crawl” and then “sitemaps”

As usual, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us!