What is a sitemap? Well there are two, both act as a site index. The first is an index for the user and is a representation of all the pages on your site so that users can easily navigate to any page.

The second is an index which Google uses to find pages in your site. This is done in XML (extensible mark up language) and is a way of showing in a logical fashion the structure of your site and how often content changes on these pages.

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People have a habit of over complicating keywords. They think that by having a vast range of them they will deliver large quantities of traffic to their site, and they may do over time. But this traffic will be under qualified and most will come to nothing while your online budget gets sapped away because you are spreading it too thinly over too many keywords. Its far better to rank highly with a few highly targeted keywords which will deliver more qualified leads.

• Selection: Think about what services or products you offer. Then think about what your target customers would type in to the search engines in order to find these products and services. These are your keywords. You should remember that bigger is not always better. Selecting a keyword like ‘web design’ because it is searched for 1.2m times a month may seem like a good bet but bear in mind the amount of competition you would have. A good way to see this is to look at the number of pages Google has indexed when you Google that term.You should always marry the keywords off against your budget, the more competition for the keyword, the higher the capital outlay to reach the top spot. This is why niche keywords can prove really successful.

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The oldest and most tried and tested method for improving the link popularity of your site is the tried and tested manual one. This involves building a list of the top 50 sites that compliment your site along with various factors about the site which you will need in order to approach them. So create a spread sheet with the following headings:

1. The name of the target site

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Over the last 10 years link building has become one of the most important “off-page” factors which effects a pages performance on the search engines for any given keyword. What do I mean when I say ‘off-page’? Well this means links coming in from other sites to yours, i.e. not to do with your website pages.

What is link popularity
Google uses links to your site as an indication of how popular your pages are. It treats them like a recommendation from a friend. It also looks at the popularity of the page that is linking to that page on your site. So in essence link popularity is the number of links and the quality of them.

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