AutoMapIt Sitemap Creation Service

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.

Your sitemaps will now be delivered in record time with new web crawlers from AutoMapIt. The web crawlers are responsible for gathering information on your website and then turning it into critical information that you need to know about your website. You\’ve researched your keywords, you\’ve managed to obtain some backlinks, maybe you already have a sitemap… what could be holding you back from getting the rank you deserve?

The highly specialized system of web crawlers at AutoMapIt are designed to take your SEO efforts to the next level! Find out exactly what is holding you back from getting the traffic you expected to see when you first started out with your website. Remove the obstacles built into your website since day 1 and try out the blazing fast crawlers at AutoMapIt.

By way of comparison, if Jules Verne had improved the speed of  Phileas Fogg\’s trip around the world by the same amount… he would have made the trip in only 1.4 days instead of 80!

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