SEO Rants and Resources

The importance of Site Maps

A very useful but often overlooked element of a website is the site map. If your site is less than 20 or 25 pages you may not need one. However, larger sites and sites that have problems getting indeed by the search engines can benefit from a site map.

1) Navigation purposes

A site map literally acts as a map of your site.

2) Conveying your site’s theme

Visitors get the "big picture" of your site at a glance.

3) Site optimization purposes

This allows your site to get crawled by the search engines.

4) Organization and relevance

A site map is an easy way to follow your sites structure when you add on new sections.

For a quick read, check out The Importance of a Sitemap by Kayem Chow

Social Book Marking Madness

Everywhere you turn online you will find articles, news reports etc. about the benefits of social media and the impact it can have on your site and your SEO campaign. And it can. As part of an overall strategy, social bookmarking is used to help make others aware of resources such as web pages, lenses, blogs, articles and other social media campaign related elements.

Social bookmarking is a way for people to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages. This way your bookmarks are available to you from any computer connected to the Internet. Social bookmarking systems, allow users to save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public. Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal keywords called tags.

You find services online that swear the secret to getting a top ranking in Google today is social bookmarks. The argument they use is that sites bookmarked by real human users have been through a rather thorough review process. Of course this means that bookmarks can be interpreted as a vote for web page quality. In other words: the search engines may use data from the book marking service as a factor in its search engine algorithm.

The truth is this; the more popular any search engine optimization technique gets, the easier it is for spammers and tricksters to create false results for the sole purpose of inflating the ranks of chosen pages.

Sadly, the madness is upon us. The spammers have tools that allow them to post to tens of accounts at one time. One way to tell if a search engine optimization technique has run it’s course – to the point the Gods of Google know there is a problem and have either stopped giving credit for or have figured out how to penalize a “technique” is to see if anyone is selling it as a service on Ebay.

Social bookmarks will continue to generate traffic as humans use the social book marking sites as a search resource. Just don’t expect any bumps in your search engine rankings from it.

This is my favorite Ebay ad for the day.

One of the best ways to increase your pagerank is to have websites linking to your site. Social bookmarking sites are continuing to gain popularity and are a great way of getting free external links to your website.

This auction is for the service of submitting your website to 15 popular social bookmarking sites. Simpy.com, del.icio.us, and looklater.com are just a few of them. The sites have a range in pagerank as follows--PR8 to PR4.

Your site will be submitted to all 15 sites within 48 hours of payment. All I will need is a title to your site and the url, which I will ask for via email once payment is received.  US $9.99

Cold Calling by SEO Firms

Well meaning people in the SEO industry sometimes go off on tangents about things that they really haven’t thought through or are just picking up on topics that have been written about many times.

Take for example the nice article I reference in this post. This well meaning person wants to advise people to never hire a SEO that made a cold call.

I beg to differ and here is why. As web marketing gets more and more specialized we have to look at the resources available to us. As we start to specialize in specific industries we are able to use some resources for more than one client without having to re invent the wheel. This increases productivity and reduces costs to our clients. This is especially true when it comes to linking and web 2.0 research; posting and developing industry specific relationships.

By the way, this is a well written article that makes excellent points. It is worth taking the time to read. The article has also turned out to be good “link bait” as several of us have commented, wrote about it and posted the article to Digg etc. 

You can read the article titled, .6 Tips To Not Get Ripped Off When Buying SEO Servicesspan>