AutoMapIt Sitemap Creation Service

When you find a new webpage editor or hosting company or other web tool that makes things “easy to use”, be sure they are not making it “easy for you to lose” at the web game.

It is common for web tools to make things easier to do online and this is not a bad thing all by itself. AutoMapIt’s sitemap generator is an example of a tool that makes sitemaps easy to setup on your website without getting in the way of your true goals… more exposure for your website, more traffic, and ultimately more revenue for your business.

Many webhosts make it easy for you to setup shopping carts, blogs, and other types of websites, but some of these come with a hidden cost. Some of these webhosts will not allow you to upload to your web root. They require you to make any uploads to a special folder. This practice conflicts with the Sitemap Protocol which states that your XML sitemap needs to be located in your web root (if it contains URLs from your web root, like almost all websites do).

There is a workaround for this problem, _IF_ you can edit your robots.txt file. You can enter some special code that points to a sitemap hosted elsewhere. AutoMapIt gives you the exact code to use when you use our Pro Sitemap System. However, if your webhost does not allow you to edit your robots.txt file, they are once again working against your efforts to gain top-ranked listings on Google.

This “easy to use/easy to lose” scenario exists with tools besides your webhost. Even with a good webhost, your website creation software (blogs, forums, CMS, shopping cart, webpage editors, plugins) may make basic webpage creation easier, but it may also be restricting you from adding certain types of code that help your pages perform better.

You may have to face the tough decision to leave an easy-to-use tool once you realize that it’s working against you more than it’s working with you and it will probably not be an easy move away from such tools.

What you should be looking for is ease of use combined with flexibility. If a tool can generally make things easier for you, but still allow you to override it’s basic set of rules, then you have a tool which makes life easier without causing you to lose out on the big picture.

Today’s topic is about where to find backlinks for your site. Not just any backlinks, but really good sources and high-value links. I will cover the basics, move on to manually setting up the best link system in the world (hypothetically), then share a tool with you that actually builds this ‘hypothetical’ goldmine for links. You don’t want to miss this one!

The Basics
When Google was still a college project, they realized some major flaws in the basic design of most search engines at the time. They never separated the ads from the search results, so their results were based on highest bidder, not the most relevant pages. Google decided to look at all of the links on the web and use that as a gauge for determining a pages quality.

As Google became public (and popular), webmasters began to game the system and acquire backlinks from anywhere they could in order to boost their rank. As this happened, the system began to lose it’s value since it became a game of acquiring links indiscriminately and once again involved cash to influence their results.

Flash forward through several years of this game and Google now gives a high value to links that come from a webpage that matches your sites topic. This is called ‘relevance’ which means that the pages are somewhat related, even if not a perfect match. The closer to a perfect match you get, the more relevant the page is and the bigger the boost you get from the keywords used in that link.

Here’s the thing… as the relevance increases, the value of that link increases exponentially. This means that you need 100 links from ‘useless pages’ to equal the value from 10 links from decent pages which is equal to just one of the sweetest links you could possibly engineer. While the actual numbers may vary, they do scale out to where massive links from irrelevant sources don’t matter when pitted against a few highly relevant links.

I covered link text (the words you click on) and how to use that to influence your ranking in my last topic. That article was based on the keyword research you performed in an even earlier article in this series. When a link to your site uses your target keywords – and the page that link is on is related to your keywords – you get an even bigger boost in value for the words used in the link than if only some parts of this formula were used.

But wait! There’s more! Part of the value of the page linking to you has to do with the value of the pages that are linking to it. In other words, if a page links to you using our perfect link formula so far… good keyword research, well-built links, placed on highly relevant pages… and this page has nothing else linking to it (it is not liked at all), then it is still only of moderate value. But if we use the same ‘perfect formula’ so far and add a lot of links coming into that page (popular page), then the link value skyrockets! And if the links coming into it are relevant to the page linking to you…. welcome to the space age!

The ‘Perfect’ Link Strategy
To squeeze the most value from a link…
1) Do your keyword research. Since this is the ‘best link possible’, pick a very relevant, high value term without concern for the competition. Try to avoid single-word keywords as these markets are unusually fierce. Most purchases from an online retailer will follow a 2-4 word keyphrase search in Google.

2) Build a top-value backlink using your keywords as the link text. ‘Link text’ is the word or words that you click on, when clicking a link.

3) Put that link on a different websites’ page talking about your high-value keywords. This should be an article. Your link will appear ‘contextually’ (within the main content), which is the highest value location on a page. It will appear on a page written about your specific niche (relevance). It will use your keywords in the pages title and in it’s URL. These are a collection of very high-value criteria that search engines look at when determining rank.

4) Turn the page that your link/content is on into a very important page. Use this link formula to get links to the page linking to your site.

* The total value of the link to your site is astronomical. You have received a very targeted link from a very respected page with tons of relevance to your target keyphrase. Those are several high-value criteria for SEO links.

5) Do this again and again using subtle variations in your link such as linking to different pages within your site (not just the homepage, also called Deep Linking) and by using different keyword phrases. Try to keep your keywords relevant to the page you are pointing to. If people click on “blue suede shoes” to get to your “ruby slippers” page, then you are not being very relevant. Relevancy is a huge factor in SEO.

* You won’t be able to gain much value if this is always done with the same sites over and over. You will want to get links from different websites on different hosts using different IP addresses owned by different people. Your goal is to use different C-Class IP addresses. A class C IP is determined by the first 3 ‘octals’, or segments, of the IP. AAA.BBB.CCC.xxx In backlinking, you want your links to come from IPs with different AAA.BBB.CCC parts. A different xxx number with the same ABC numbers is still within the same C-Class.

Get No-Spank Backlinks Easily
http://www.automapit.com/backlinks

The tool
I’ve explained to you exactly how to setup a hypothetical ‘best link’ on your own, the problem is that this is beyond difficult to do in real life and to keep track of all of the sites required to pull this off so that they are spread out across hosts and domain ownership records is mind-boggling. If you actually bargained to get your link on other peoples websites, it could take days or months of your life chasing sites who don’t respond to you. But there IS a better way…

There is a service that works very similar to this ‘perfect storm’ link scenario. Actually, there is another layer of links that point to the pages that point to your articles which point to your website (intense link value) when using this system. Their vast resources allow them to have no ‘footprint’ as a link building tool. Their network contains so many sites on so many servers owned by so many different people that there is no ‘signature’ to find and there are no links required from your own website. What you are getting are the highest quality links from quality websites. This appears completely natural… because it is natural.

If you do the math on the number of links you get, it is actually a very reasonable price for such expertly crafted links. Their effectiveness is amazing, not one user of my system has ever canceled because it didn’t work. It always works!

This is not the kind of service which removes your links from their system if you choose not to renew, so it is truly an investment in the future rank for your website. Why would you pay anything for a disappearing link? That makes no sense!

AutoMapIt Backlinks provides professional support by email. If you want to rank as fast as possible without sending up red flags in the search engines, this is the perfect system for you.

http://www.automapit.com/backlinks

-Shawn Snarski
AutoMapIt.com

We all know that keywords are the focus of any SEO effort. Keywords are searched for by people looking to make purchases online. When your site comes up in Google, they become your customers! This is a simple process to understand, but how do you get your site listed on Google (besides using the best sitemaps around)?

Google uses many criteria to rank pages and one major area of factors they use deals with your keywords. Are they used in links to your site? Do you use them on your pages? Are they in your domain name, URLs, H1 tags, and page titles?

Of course they are! Right? You’ve heard all of this before throughout the SEO world, but which keywords do you focus on? If you sell ‘blue bonnets’, then your choice is simple… say blue bonnet a lot, buy bluebonnets.com, and have people link to your bluebonnet.html page so that their users click on the words blue bonnet. Correct?

Simple. But since everyone is doing this, you may have to dig a bit deeper to get past your competition. What are you looking for in order to gain an edge over your competition? You want “Related Terms”. Google has an understanding of which terms belong together. You may want to mention Easter Bonnets or Fancy Hats… but which terms does Google think are related?

Enter the Wonder Wheel tool from Google! Using this tool while searching for “blue bonnets” shows a look inside of Google’s mind… Some related terms include things for flowers, musical bands, pictures and paintings of blue bonnets, and ‘facts’ about blue bonnets. Cool! After a short journey through the wonderwheel, it becomes clear that Google sees blue bonnets as flowers, not hats. so…

We search for the single word ‘bonnets’ and see a whole group of hat-related terms. It seems that focusing on the blue bonnets as a search term was putting us in the wrong neighborhood and Google misunderstood the site.

From this term, ‘bonnet’, we see that Google identifies this with the hats (not flowers) and that there are a number of directions to go in… baby bonnets, sun bonnets, rain bonnets, easter bonnets, victorian bonnets. Let’s pick the ‘Sun Bonnets’ and see where that leads us…

One thing that strikes me is that for the ‘parent term’ of bonnet, I see ‘bonnet patterns’ and for the ‘child term’ of “sun bonnets”, I can see “sun bonnet patterns”.

It seems that having a webpage called “bonnetpatterns.html” would be a very good way to rock the search engines and to promote the ‘blue’ pattern on this page!

This example took me about 5 minutes to review using the Google tool and when I create the bonnetpatterns.html page, I know that Google will come to understand that our site has to do with the blue bonnets you wear on your head, not the ones you plant in the ground.

Let me repeat this important point… Google will come to understand that our site has to do with the blue bonnets you wear on your head, not the ones you plant in the ground.

Our site will finally begin ranking for the right kinds of terms, bounce rate will drop off to almost nothing, conversion rate goes up, and the site becomes the leading sales producer for bonnets!

How do you use the Wonder Wheel? Run any search on Google. To the left of where they say “Results 1 – 10 of about 1,000,000″ is a link that says “Show Options”. Click this link and a sidebar will appear on the left of your screen. Look down the list and click on “Wonder Wheel”.

The rest is simple… click on the related terms that match what it is you do on your site, then maybe click on another term related to your site. Within a few clicks, you should have a collection of terms that help to shape your website in the eyes of Google. Their mind comes to understand that your site is related to these terms and that is where they will begin to rank your site.

If you are curious as to which terms are the most used on your website, log into your AutoMapIt Pro account and check the SEO Report. This tool lists every page on your site and which keywords are most prominent on each page of your site. AutoMapIt Pro goes even further and gives you a set of keywords that reflect your ENTIRE website.

The keywords used on ALL pages of your site is called your websites ‘keyword theme’ and has more to do with reinforcing what you have on each page. If your particular page is heavy on the “scented soaps” keyword and your site theme is leaning towards “brick laying”, then you will have a hard time ranking for the soaps. The page mentioning the soaps is considered a fluke and may not be ‘properly represented’ on a masonry website.

Keyword usage always requires a bit of common sense, but with the right tools, you can get a solid feel for what the search engines want to see and what you are actually telling them your website is about.

If your Google ranking is not where you want it to be, then reviewing your keywords using the AutoMapIt Pro System may be a very good place to start!

Some comments by Amit Singhal of Google give us an interesting look into how Google calculates the \’importance\’ of Twitter messages (also called tweets) when determining ranking positions. An article quoting Amit at http://www.technologyreview.com/web/24353/page1 mentions several factors that are very similar to \’normal\’ search ranking criteria for webpages with a few key differences.

Our old friend PageRank has resurfaced when Google evaluates tweets! It is slightly different than the old PageRank formula since it is based on followers instead of links. When Person A follows Person B on Twitter… it is said that A is following B and that B has a follower. The more people that follow you, the more important your tweets become in Google\’s eyes.

But it goes deeper than this! If the people following you were all just recently created and nobody is following them, they give you less importance for your \’PageRank\’ value. If the people following you are giants on Twitter and have tons of people following them, then you only need a few of these people to really boost the ranking of your tweets.

It\’s not just how many people follow you… it\’s about how many people follow each of the people following you. Just like the old PageRank formula for websites used to work, a few links from high PR pages are way more valuable than hundreds of links from low ranked pages. In other words, don;t go opening Twitter account just to follow your main account. It won\’t work.

Bing has previously announced that they are simply using the number of followers a specific tweet author has. It\’s a much simpler formula, but it can be abused by a Twitterer with lots of accounts created to specifically follow one main account.

Another factor in TweetRank is whether or not you use a hash symbol in your tweet (#). If you write your tweet and include a hash symbol followed by a word, your tweet shows up in Twitter whenever that keyword is searched for. This is excellent for boosting your Twitter traffic, but Google will be penalizing tweets with hash symbols in an effort to reduce the effectiveness of potential spam. Don\’t use a hash in your tweet if you want Google to list it!

Google also uses some fancy algebra to pick out related terms amongst the millions of tweets and to group certain terms together. In laymens terms, this is how phrases like \”Bill Clinton\” and \”Monica Lewinsky\” come to be considered \’related terms\’ in the search engines. If your topic relates to a current event of some sort, it raises the value of that tweet. Just be sure that you don\’t force a relationship that doesn\’t really exist! Mentioning a current hurricane won\’t help you to sell diamonds…

Overall, the article reinforces that Google\’s use of real-time search is growing. Expect the Twitter ranking factors to change over time and expect to see Google use more news and blogs in their real-time results as time goes on.

A recently published study looked at 500 Million URLs that were seen both by sitemaps and using \’natural discovery\’ methods. Of this sample of URLs, the study revealed that 77% of the URLs were first seen by Google on a sitemap!

http://www2009.eprints.org/100/1/p991.pdf

To put this as simple as possible… use sitemaps if you have any interest in being indexed faster.

Another interesting note from this study is how \”a search engine\” would use a signal-to-noise ratio to determine better quality (more trustable) sitemaps. The \’signal\’ is how many pages progress through their search system and are eventually clicked on. The \’noise\’ is how many URLs fall short of that goal and at what point they are eliminated from the process.

The lessons learned here can be achieved by using filters on your domain settings at AutoMapIt. Remove URLs from your sitemap that don\’t add content to your site… buy now, view cart, make post, reply to post, sort up/down, calendars with no events that go on forever… and plenty of others similar to these. They are very useful links to have on your site, but when was the last time you saw Google list a \’view cart\’ link? By stripping out these types of URLs from your sitemaps, you will be improving your signal-to-noise ratio and improving the chances that your most important pages are getting indexed quickly.