Nick and James explain the basics of sitemaps and how to generate search friendly sitemaps online, both XML and HTML.

With the SEO industry expanding their are lots of companies that can offer their services, Creare included. Some websites perform better in search engines than others, this is often due to the sites architecture. Static pages, domain age, backward links and domain name can all help towards an SEO campaign. I have complied a list below of things that will set you in good shape for an SEO campaign as well as things that may mean that your website will need to be re-build from your search engine optimisation company.

Things to look for:

• ? marks in URL’s, This means that the page is a DB (database) query and can often restrict the performance of your site, Google and other major search engines do not rank these types of pages very highly. This can be fixed by converting them to permalinked (SEO friendly) extension. Most developers would provide this functionality, but otherwise it may have to be a rebuild.
• Automated Meta Data & Page Titles, If your site automatically generates Meta data via a CMS (content management system) it can often cause issues, Search engines will see them as unusable and not accurate. This can also be fixed via certain development techniques.
• Domain Age, if you have a brand new site and you want to optimise for a hugely competitive phrase you can often run the risk of the ’sandbox’. If Google thinks a site has been unnatural with its development and growth (i.e. an SEO company building pages and links) you can be removed from the search results. The older the domain the better, but nothing is impossible you just have to consider the time scales.
• Flash Websites, flash websites can look great but the content will not be correctly read by search engines, you firstly have to ensure that your flash website is coded properly and that google can find a text based version of your site, otherwise it will not find anything. Also flash websites are usually based on 1 page, meaning as far as Google can see your site has no depth or additional content.
• Frames, if you have a HTML site (not flash) and you browse through your site you can usually see the URL extension changing as you go, if it remains the root URL on everypage, the site has been set up using frames and the search engine will not be able to define your specified sitemap.
• Domain names, A keyword rich domain name is great, but a domain that is 100 characters long full of keywords isn’t.