But sadly, while many websites have a lot of effort put into the look and functionality of the website, many website developers fail to finish it off with the essentials that play the most important role in ensuring you can be found easily on the search engines, and one of the most important (and often overlooking) is the HTML and XML Sitemaps.

There are a few types of sitemap:

HTML Sitemaps – This is usually just a link on the footer of every webpage that will point you to a page with all pages of the website listed, with links to these pages. The advantage of this is for people to find your pages easily, which is important especially in larger websites. It also plays a key role in helping search engines to trawl through your website quicker.

XML Sitemaps – The XML Sitemap cannot be seen through the main website through a browser, however hopefully your web developer or webmaster has created and uploaded this for your website as it is even more relevant than the standard HTML sitemap. The XML sitemap can be easily generated using specific software designed for this purpose.
Once the XML sitemap is created it should be uploaded to Google through their Google Webmaster Tools, which you will need to create an account for. You should also do the same for Bing Webmaster Center and Yahoo Siteexplorer for the best results on all the major search engines.

If you are making frequent changes to your website, or run an online shopping cart or directory, then it is important to ensure the sitemap is recreated every time these changes take place, and then your XML sitemap is resubmitted to Google, Bing and Yahoo to ensure your new pages or changes are updated.

At Devision Design, large websites have a special automatic Sitemap Generator added which allows the site owner or the team at Devision to simply push a button and the new HTML, XML and ROR Sitemaps be recreated and submitted to all the mentioned search engine Webmaster accounts, not only saving you a heap of time-consuming work, but also generating an immediate response from the search engines, so you can often see the new pages appear in the search engines in a matter of minutes.

So, if you are unsure about if your website had an XML Sitemap or an XML Sitemap generator, then I advise you to ask your web developer as you could be missing a lot of valuable visitors to your website through a poor search engine listing.

Author: Chris Bourke of Devision Design & Web SEO Coach
We recommend Web Crowd Website Hosting Australia

Most people are familiar with ensuring your website is well keyworded, but many do not realise the importance of ‘keyword density‘.

Adding too many keywords can see your website blacklisted for spamming, while not having enough specific keywords may not be strong enough to get you a mention at all.

Often you will notice that the highest ranking websites under most general search terms are the larger directory-based websites, while the smaller individual business websites are often following.

One of the main reasons larger websites outrank sites this way is due to the Keyword Density.

Keyword Density is quite simple to master when you know how it works…
Basically Keyword Density is the density of the priority keywords throughout the entire website. So for instance if you only have a three page website, then to get a high density you would need to use the main priority keywords that you would like to be found in the search engines very heavily throughout those three pages. The problem with this is that if you use the keyword too much you could be blacklisted!

But using the same keywords throughout a website with more pages provides a higher keyword density without overly using those keywords on each page, and the beauty of a larger website is that you can also use additional priority keywords throughout the website as well, so you have a multitude of popular search phrases throughout the website.

Where I live here on the Sunshine Coast in Australia, the main business trade is holiday accommodation. Being a very competitive market it is obviously important to ensure the accommodation websites that make it to the top have the best keyword density.

Having built a large number of Sunshine Coast accommodation websites over the past years, it was always a challenge to ensure they outrank their competitors, but with a good basic knowledge of how to correctly use keywords and keyword density it becomes quite easy once you know the correct technique.

However, there are many Sunshine Coast accommodation websites lately that are integrating the booking systems of other websites into their website’s navigation, which in theory makes it easier for them to accept bookings online. However the negative reaction by the search engines from this is that they are immediately diluting their keyword density of their own website and substituting it with the linked keywords that are found on the other website that is now integrated into their navigation. This means that if the linked website contains unrelated keywords, such as other accommodation locations (for instance, Gold Coast, Brisbane, Sydney, etc) then their density for Sunshine Coast accommodation immediately drops greatly, sending them sliding backwards down the search engine rankings ladder. Even worse, if their are replacing their own navigation with links to pages from another website then the results can be catastrophic, as the most important content of most websites, from a search engine’s perspective, is found in the top area of your web pages.

To check your own keyword density of your website I recommend a software package called Web CEO. Web CEO software allows you to review your keyword density yourself (as well as your competitors!) and allows you to change your density live yourself very easily. It will also show you if any websites directly linked into your navigation are damaging your keyword density or search engine listings.
Check out the software online at http://www.webceo.com

Using some basic techniques and knowledge of Keyword Density can get your website to the top spots in the search engines!

For a free Keyword Density report of your own website (or your competitors!) visit http://www.devision.com.au

Author: Chris Bourke of Devision Design Australia – Developers of the best ranking Sunshine Coast accommodation websites!

It is distributed free of charge by Google, either as a stand alone software or integrated into their other web marketing programs.GA tracks down all visitors coming to the site from various sources and referrers, such as search engines, and compile them. These are then presented to to the user as statistical data. Often other types of information is also present in the data, like those coming from pay per click networks and email marketing materials, as well as PDF links. And when integrated with other Google market analysis tools, such as AdSense, GA will also show data from the areas covered by these.Because of the large amounts of data that GA present, it can be quite confusing for many first time users. However, once you get the hang of it, it should become much easier.

However, there are some items that you need to take note from the very start.The traffic chart at the top of your GA page is the easiest to notice. It is also the most important, as it gives you a visual overview of your site’s traffic. Here, you can adjust the coverage of the chart by simply selecting your desired dates. You can also immediately compare different data sets by choosing the time periods you want to display.Below the traffic chart graph is the Site Usage section. Here, you will see a breakdown of site traffic into its components. There are six sections in here, three of which provide you with important general data.

The Visitors section obviously gives you the actual number of people going into your site. Pageviews, on the other hand, tells you how many times each page of your site has been accessed. Lastly, the New Visitors section gives you an idea of how many new visitors you are getting, this is very important as it will help you determine your increase in reach. Each section also has a View Report option so that you can see a more detailed analysis.In addition to these major features, GA also has a map overlay section, which gives you a breakdown of the countries from where people are accessing your site. This is especially important for those that want to market their sites globally.

The application will also give you a lowdown of where the traffic actually comes from: whether it is a direct access, a query from search engines or a link from other sites. These information will then come in handy for optimization purposes.Because of enormous information that Google Analytics churn out, it has become an indispensable tool for many. However, how you use these data and actually make the most out of them is an entirely different story altogethe

We hear them saying people just aren’t spending on services, or people are’t going on holidays, or people aren’t buying new products, etc etc.

I find the term ‘global marketing crisis‘ more of an excuse for business failure, than the truth.

If an economic crisis is truly the case then why are some of the major retail players such as Apple, JB Hi-Fi and others posting record profits in the past 2 quarters?

The answer is ‘simple’ – The employ simple marketing strategies!

By using simple, and often free, marketing tools and strategies you will blow off the excuse of a ‘global marketing crisis’ and your business will boom, no matter what the media is saying!

Here are a few handy tips to help:

1. USING THE WEB…

Your website is a great point of presence and reaches a wider audience than most other advertising and promotional mediums. And the best thing about it is that web hosting only costs around $95 a year. Thats value for global marketing!

Make sure all you website content is up to date and the site looks fresh and professional. People are more likely to deal with someone with a professional looking website. You wouldn’t paint your own signage, or build your own office building, so don’t build your own website! Get a professional!

Make sure you have the main basic contact details so people can contact you easily. Add a contact form to your website and collect additional information, such as how did they hear about you, would they like to join your mailing list, etc. This information can be used for future promotions.

Make sure your website is well search engine optimised. If you aren’t on the first page of Google you are out of the running. And believe it or not, a first page listing on Google is easily achievable if correctly optimized. If you’re not on that first page, go have a quiet talk to your web developer! SEO should be part of the standard service provided with any website. Without it, it is like buying a car without an engine…you won’t go far.

Embrace the many free Google Webmaster tools to promote your business, like the free Google Business listing, Google Analytics, Google Maps, Google Keyword Tool, Blogger, Google Trends, etc. Google have made it so easy to be found online, and they charge nothing!

Invest in SEO Tools such as WebCEO – It’s a great tool for reviewing your website’s SEO (and your competitiors, and fine tuning and submitting your website yourself. It really makes the difference.

Use online Social Networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Myspace to promote your business and services. Your listing on any of these also gets found easily on the search engines. Using Twitter alone, one of my businesses profitability has jumped 180% in the past 3 months. Free marketing works wonders!

Create and write a regular blog. Blogs such as WordPress and Blogger provide free software, and they get picked up on Google within minutes. They can also be lined directly to you Twitter account or LinkedIn accounts so your post automatically reaches an even larger crowd.

Submit your website to as many free directories online as possible. The more sites you are directly linked to the better your pagerank, and in turn the better your listing chances on the search engines. Plus you reach a much wider audience from people that use the directories.
For starters, you can add a free listing to our own directory, BusinessBrisbane.com. It currently ranks as one of the best directories in Brisbane and we don’t charge a cent to list! Go on..sign up! www.BusinessBrisbane.com (for Brisbane regional businesses only).

Employ email marketing tools, and send regular enewsletters to your customers. Many customers will usually send to a friend if it is interesting, so your potential customer base rapidly expands.

2. BRANDING…

Ensure your branding and advertising is professional. The use of an effective logo and brand elements such as a slogan can be a very simple yet powerful marketing tool. Look at McDonald’s for example..they probably don’t make the world’s best tasting burgers, but they are still the world’s largest hamburger seller! Their iconic logo and simple catchy adverts is the real success. If you don’t have a nice little logo, it is worth the small investment.

Ensure your branding remains consistent. Make sure your logo is always the same colour, your advertising templates remain consistent, and print work is always in tune.

3. SELF PROMOTION & NETWORKING…

People like to deal with people they know and trust. Find your local business networking clubs and sign up. Many invite you as a guest to your first meeting to get a feel for it. Within no time you will be meeting business referrals that will be needing your services!
Make you go to each meeting well equipped with the basic marketing tools including a few brochures and nice business cards. Spend the extra few dollars and go for the nice feeling matt celloglazed finish full colour business cards. You can usually purchase 1000 for around $140, which is a great first impression investment!

For more tips on how to market your business on a budget, visit our website blog: www.devision.com.au/blog

Article by Chris Bourke from Devision Design Australia

So what is the correct method to achieving successful lasting results with One Way Link Building?

Firstly, lets explain a bit more about One Way Link Building, and how it works….
Link Popularity is one method that Google, Yahoo and other Search Engines use while evaluating pages.

I like to use my analogy of the ‘Popular Kid’ Theory…

If you are the new kid at school and you have no friends then obviously your popularity is O. You can excel at subjects, or attract attention in another way and your popularity will eventually but slowly rise. Or alternatively you can hang out with the popular kids and in turn you become popular more quickly.
But what if you hang out with popular kids that don’t have anything relative to you. For instance, if you like football, but they like surfing? Then your popularity might not be as good because you don’t have as much in common. And of course, if you have nothing in common at all, then you are wasting your time totally.

Page Rank works in a very similar fashion. If you build links to similar pages using reference tags that relate to that other linking page then your page rank will quickly increase. For instance if you have a hotel and you want to link to an already popular hotel accommodation directory then as you both have relative links and therefor your pagerank should increase dramatically. But if you have a hotel in New York and the hotel directory is all about Sydney Hotels then your pagerank may not do as well. And if you have a hotel in New York and you link to a car sales website then you are just probably doing yourself damage! You have no relative link.

There are two types of Link Building – Reciprocal Links and One Way Links. Reciprocal Linking is when you exchange links between websites, so a link for the other relative website is placed on your site, and vice-versa.
One Way Links are as it states..a one way link with no reciprocal link. One way links are difficult to acquire as many websites do not link linking back to avoid dropping their own established page rank, but once you have acquired them the long time benefits are fantastic. As I mentioned above, if they share similar topics to your website then they add real value on the search engines and you will gain a great long term pagerank and the visitors to your website will flock.

So how do you get these links? You can either go the slow process of scouring for websites that relate to yours and then send them an email or phone them up kindly requesting a link back. Many will want to charge you for the opportunity, and many will flatly reject you. Or you can use SEO Link Building Services, and for a small fee (usually monthly) they will use their professional software and find sites that offer One Way Linking and do all the work for you. The results are usually very good, and for the small price you might pay, the long term benefits will outweigh!

Author: Chris Bourke is a website designer @ Devision.com.au and author of WebSEOCoach.com

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings, and could be considered a subset of search engine marketing. The term SEO also refers to “search engine optimizers,” an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients’ sites. Some commentators, and even some SEOs, break down methods used by practitioners into categories such as “white hat SEO” (methods generally approved by search engines, such as building content and improving site quality), or “black hat SEO” (tricks such as cloaking and spamdexing). White hatters say that black hat methods are an attempt to manipulate search rankings unfairly. Black hatters counter that all SEO is an attempt to manipulate rankings, and that the particular methods one uses to rank well are irrelevant.

Search engines display different kinds of listings in the search engine results pages (SERPs), including: pay per click advertisements, paid inclusion listings, and organic search results. SEO is primarily concerned with advancing the goals of a website by improving the number and position of its organic search results for a wide variety of relevant keywords.

Early search engines

Webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a site to the various engines which would run spiders, programs to “crawl” the site, and store the collected data. The default search-bracket was to scan an entire webpage for so-called related search words, so a page with many different words matched more searches, and a webpage containing a dictionary-type listing would match almost all searches, limited only by unique names. The search engines then sorted the information by topic, and served results based on pages they had crawled.

Organic search engines

Google was started by two PhD students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and brought a new concept to evaluating web pages. This concept, called PageRank, has been important to the Google algorithm from the start. PageRank relies heavily on incoming links and uses the logic that each link to a page is a vote for that page’s value. The more incoming links a page had the more “worthy” it is. The value of each incoming link itself varies directly based on the PageRank of the page it comes from and inversely on the number of outgoing links on that page.

The relationship between SEO and the search engines

The first mentions of Search Engine Optimization don’t appear on Usenet until 1997, a few years after the launch of the first Internet search engines. The operators of search engines recognized quickly that some people from the webmaster community were making efforts to rank well in their search engines, and even manipulating the page rankings in search results. In some early search engines, such as Infoseek, ranking first was as easy as grabbing the source code of the top-ranked page, placing it on your website, and submitting a URL to instantly index and rank that page.
Due to the high value and targeting of search results, there is potential for an adversarial relationship between search engines and SEOs. In 2005, an annual conference named AirWeb was created to discuss bridging the gap and minimizing the sometimes damaging effects of aggressive web content providers.

About the Author:

Prashant K Shukla is a successful webmaster and author. Visit his website http://www.mysmartseo.com to read more articles on SEO. Know about lot of free tools to help link building, get back links, boost traffic and ranking of your website. Permission to reprint this article is granted if the article is reproduced in its entirety, without modification, including the bio information. Please include a hyper link to http://www.mysmartseo.com

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com – SEO Basics