First off you might not know what a Google Sitemap or a XML sitemap is.

This is a file that you put on your site that is only for the search engine spiders it is not seen by your visitors.

This file can get you indexed very quickly with Google, MSN, Yahoo! and Ask because it lists all the pages on your site and how often they are modified. This makes the search engines happy because they don’t have to work as hard to get all your listings.

This is a great tool in the SEO wars, it lets you get your pages indexed in no time and let’s face it you can’t do well in the search engines unless you are indexed.

There are a couple of free programs that you can use to create your sitemaps, if you have a WordPress blog you can use a plugin called Google XML Sitemap from Arne Brachhold that will automatically create your sitemap and notify the search engines, if your site isn’t on WordPress you can use a program called GSite Crawler to create and upload your XML sitemap.

I do highly recommend that you have a XML sitemap for your site because it WILL help you get your content indexed and move you up the search engines. With that said…

YOUR XML SITEMAP CAN BE HURTING YOUR RANKING!

If you have errors in your sitemap it can actually hurt your rankings with Google, most of the time when people think about errors they figure the code in the sitemap must be the cause but both the programs listed above will create your sitemap with perfect code but you can still have errors as far as Google is concerned.

The reason for this is because Google not only holds your sitemap to the strict XML code but it also holds your site to Google’s policies for indexing, such as 404 error (missing pages) which a lot of people know about but what a lot of people don’t know about is that you will also get errors if you violate their redirect policy on your site.

Google doesn’t like redirects that never become visible to the viewer. Things like cloaked affiliate links and sales links and these will create an error in your sitemap. This only applies if you have the links actually in your sitemap, if they are coming from your site such as www.mysite.com/recommends/buythis.html then they will probably be in your sitemap. This is a common cloaking technique for affiliate links.

Sales links can also create this, for example on one of my sites I use DownLoad Guard to handle the sales and download protection for my products. The script creates a link for the purchase that goes to the script and then redirects the customer to ClickBank to purchase the product. The viewer never sees the page they are clicking on.

While there is nothing nefarious about this link Google still sees it as a violation of their policy and it will create an error in your sitemap file and this can get you knocked down in the listings.

To fix this you can simply put a no follow tag in the link you are using.

HOW DO YOU KNOW IF YOU HAVE ERROR IN YOUR XML SITEMAP?

This is actually pretty easy to do. Just signup at Google Webmaster Tools and register all your sites that have XML sitemaps. If they see an error they will mark it as a warning and even tell you what the problem is.

Once you have verified all your sites wait a couple of days and log in to see if you have any errors. If you see a warning beside any of the sites click on it and it will tell you the error if it is too many redirects start using the no follow tag on those links or remove the links from your sitemap.

If you would be interested in me making a video showing you how to set up your Google Account for sitemaps and how to fix some of the errors let me know by leaving a comment below.

This is another requested post from the Tell Me What You Want comment section.

The terms tag and keyword are quite often used in the same context but they have different purposes.

Keywords are individual words or phrases that describe your page and that you are trying to get indexed and placed in the search engines.

Tags are basically categories that describe your page and used mostly to get your web page found on Social Bookmarking sites, which work like directories instead of a search engine.

What’s the difference between a search engine and a directory (Social Bookmarking site)?

The difference is how the information is obtained and delivered to the end user.

In a search engine there is an algorithm that reads the page and tries to decipher how relevant the page is to the keywords that you are searching for. The more the algorithm thinks the page is relevant the higher weight is places on the page and the higher the page turns up in the results.

Directories work with categories (tags) when you do a search it looks for a category that matches your search and then selects all the sites in that category. Once all the sites are selected either an algorithm, of sorts, is run on the site in that category, they are given weight and then displayed or they are shown by some other standard, such as the number of votes they received by being bookmarked or just by the date they were entered.

It is a subtle distinction and if done right your site should turn up in both searches but since I am a SEO guy I usually concentrate on my keywords where as a Web 2.0 guy would concentrate on the tags.

The question was specifically about keywords and tag in blogs now before I go into any details here I want make sure you know that I have only used Wordpress to create blogs and I am not familiar with any other blogging platform.

One of the things you do when you create a blog is create categories that you post to. These categories should be keywords and since they are categories they usually end up being tags as well. The main purpose of the categories is so that the viewers can navigate your blog easier.

The added advantage is that the categories will add your keywords to your post URL if you have you blog set up to do a mod rewrite. You set this the admin area under options – permalinks select custom and add

/%category%/%postname%

This will put your category and the title of your post in the URL. (You will have to upload the .htaccess file to your site but you have instructions on how to create that on the permalink page.)

The next thing is you want to do is use your keywords in your title for your post. This does a couple of things the most important of which is to get your keywords in your title tag for the page that displays the post. You have seen from my previous posts that this is important for search engine optimization.

Since most wordpress themes also put the title of your posts in the H2 tag this also helps with your optimization.

You also want to make sure you use your keywords in the content of your post. Don’t over do it, yes you can have problems with the search engines by using your keywords too often but more importantly you will usually loose your reader before that happens. When you try to force in the keywords you end up with a page that annoys a human. Just use your keywords where they would naturally appear but try to use them in both singular and plural. Believe or not with all the technology in search engines they still consider the singular and plural different words.

Use your keywords as your Blog Title. Again you can set this in the admin section under options – general. The Blog title goes into the title tag for every page (at least in most themes) and this will get your keywords where you want them. Remember depending on the theme you are using these might also turn up in the header section of your site so you will have to decide which is more important to you SEO or site appearance. Or you can edit the theme and put in a graphic in the header or just different text in the header. This will require a little HTML and CSS knowledge. If you don’t know HTML or CSS you can hire some one to do this for you from places like RentaCoder.

OK, that covers the search engine optimization part of tags and keywords and will help with your search engine rankings but all of the above won’t help you in most Social Bookmarking sites. This is where your tags come into play.

The purpose of tags in social bookmarking sites is to create categories where like minded people interested in the same topics can share information and interesting web pages.

For this reason you want your tags to be something that describes your post. For example for this post I would use the tags:

• Tagging
• Keywords
• SEO
• Search Engine Optimization

Because that is what this post is about.

Now to cover your post title and tags. Having the tag in the post title for social bookmaking isn’t as important as having a title that people will respond to.

Remember in most social bookmarking sites when you are show the sites in the categories you are shown either the title of the post or the title that was entered when the post was first submitted to the site and a brief blurb or comment.

In these cases the title works a lot like a headline on a sales page. If you don’t get the viewers attention they just skim by you and don’t go to your post and if they don’t go to your post and read your post then there is no way they are going to like your post.

Since I am creating this post for some one that goes by the name, “The Anti Hype” I will add this. You don’t have to hype your title but if it is about the content of your post then it will have better drawing power.

Take this post, my title for the post is “Tag or Keyword, Which is it? Do they affect SEO?” It’s not hype but for people looking for information on tag, keyword, SEO it has that in the title and it will get their attention and possibly get them to read this post. Isn’t that the main purpose of creating these posts to have other people read them?

This is another post from a Tell Me What You Want comment.

First let’s define what a retail site is.

A retail site is a site that sells numerous products from the site and usually has a shopping cart system to take the orders. The products can be digital but most of the time they are physical products that need to be delivered. Amazon.com is probably one of the best examples of a retail website.

Websites for retail stores have two basic types - hand coded where every page is made by somebody and uploaded to the site and dynamic where a script feeds the information from a database to create the site.

The resultant pages should have the same features when it come to on page Search Engine Optimization.

First you want to break down your products into categories but these categories should be keywords that you are using.

For example if you are selling pet supplies you would probably want general categories of:

• Dog Supplies
• Cat Supplies
• Fish Supplies
• Other Supplies

This will not only be the category but the first part of your title tag for the product.

Once you have your general categories you would then need to break them down to sub-categories.

Dog Supplies

• Dog Collars
• Dog Leashes
• Dog Houses
• Dog Bowls

Then in each category you will have your products. The title tag for the product page should be a chain of categories ending in either a description of the product or the model identification for the product. Whether you use a description or a model number depends on the product for example when you are dealing with electronics people search for specific model numbers. Here is an example of what a title tag should look like for a digital camera.

Electronics – Digital Camera – Sony DSCS 730

Electronics and Digital Camera are both categories on the website with digital camera being a sub-category. You could take this a step further and add sub-categories under digital camera for still and video.

Remember you want your title tag to be clear, keyword related and concise. Google only reads the first 65 characters of your title tag so you want to get all your keywords in before you reach their limit.

Now for some products you will definitely want to use a description of the product instead of an item number. Let’s go back to the pet supplies; if I was going to the search engine to look for a spike leather collar for my dog I would search something like this, “leather spike dog collar”. I wouldn’t know an item number for it. So your product page title should look something like this:

Dog Supplies – Dog Collars – Spiked Leather Collar

As you can see, that tag would fulfill my search rather well.

Do note that I don’t have the domain name in either of these title tags. Unless your domain name has keywords in it (which I highly recommend) then it won’t help you from an SEO stand point. If you do want to have your domain name included in the title tag and it has no keywords in it put it at the end of the tag so that it doesn’t take away from the 65 characters that Google reads.

Dog Supplies – Dog Collars – Spiked Leather Collar – From the Curiosity Shop

Also notice that I have dashes between the categories. In recent reports I have read that if you put a pipe instead of a dash it does better for SEO. I haven’t personally tested this yet so I can’t vouch for the effectiveness. But you could try it.

Dog Supplies | Dog Collars | Spiked Leather Collar | From the Curiosity Shop

Then end product page should also have as much content as you can provide about the product on the page and have your keywords worked into the description. Don’t over use them or force them, they should flow naturally because you are describing the item and the item should fit those keywords. If your item doesn’t match your keywords then you are using the wrong keywords.

The next items don’t have the impact of the title tag but every little bit helps.

You page names should also contain your keywords but make sure you put a hyphen or underscore between the words. For the main domain name the search engines will actually break out the individual words but for sub-folders and page names they don’t seem to do this.

Instead of a URL that looks like this:

http://www.site.com/dogcollars/spikedleathercollar.html

It should look like this:

http://www.site.com/dog-collars/spiked-leather-collar.html

If you have an image of the product on the product page make sure you use the alt tag to describe the product and name the image something that describes it. For example the image for the spiked leather collar could be name spiked-leather-dog-collar.jpg. This helps if some one does an image search.

It also helps if you can put the product description at the top of the page in an H1 tag. If you don’t like the way the H1 tags look on your page then use a CSS style to make them look the way you want.

Having the content on the product page makes the page more relevant for the search engines. This is why sites like Amazon.com let customers post their comments and reviews for the product on the product page.

The technique described above is a great way to work the “long tail” keywords for a retail website and if your site is hand coded it is fairly easy to implement but most retail websites are scripted.

Most of the big retailers have custom made scripts and they can have their programmers integrate these techniques without much problem. But if you aren’t that big look for a script that will do this:

• You want to be able to make categories and sub-categories
• You want script that will dynamically create the title tags for you but you have some control over what goes in the title tag.
• You want a script that will let you configure the layout of the product page, including changing the way the item name is coded so that you can make it a H1 tag
• You want a script that creates real URL’s instead of just coded links. I will explain this one:

Some scripts use product id numbers to create pages on the fly and you end up with a URL that looks something like this.

http://www.site.com/products.php?id=983794

You don’t want your URL to look like that you want it to contain your keywords. This is usually done with something call a mod rewrite that will take the link above and make it:

http://www.site.com/dog-collars/spiked-leather-collar.html

And this will be a valid URL when ever some one comes to your site. This blog works the same way.

But remember all of this is just to get them to your site. Once there you have to convert them and a key factor in that is how easy it is to use your site. If a possible customer comes to your site and gets confused they will probably leave without purchasing.

I recommend a book by Steve Krug called, “Don’t Make Me Think, A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability.” You can pick it up at Amazon.com of course.

A little while ago I wrote a post telling you about on page Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the the two most important items were the Title tag and the Domain name.

Well, I just took a look in Google to see if this blog was being indexed yet and I searched the phrase Starting Steps. Guess what, it is on the first page of Google out of 5,000,000 + pages that turn up for that term. Which isn’t bad at all. But that is just the beginning try searching for, making money starting steps and internet marketing starting steps. I was pleasantly surprised at the results.

The one that surprised me the most was internet marketing starting steps. I had 4 of the top 10 places and one of them doesn’t even have any content on it.

Click the image to see it larger.

But it’s not just Google check out these from MSN Live Search

This is all from the title tag and the domain name. Like I said the last one for coaching in the Google results doesn’t even have any content on it.

What does all this mean?

It means that if you are planning to get a majority of your traffic from search engines you should work the keywords into your domain name or create another domain with your keywords that can be used to drive the traffic to your site.

Oh, by the way check the page rank of this site. It is 0 That’s right a big fat zero, nothing, nada!

That is right, I got these placements without any page rank. Remember that when they tell you that on page optimization doesn’t matter that all you need are back links. I will undoubtedly be writing more about page rank in the near future.