(This article was originally published on the Visual Script blog.)

Sitemaps are a crucial aspect of a successful website. First, let’s make it clear what we mean with a sitemap. There are two types of sitemaps: one meant for visitors of your website, and one for search engine spiders.

Sitemaps for Visitors
The first type of sitemap is probably very familiar to you. It’s a webpage that shows an overview of all the content on a website. You can see an example here of our own Visual Script sitemap.

This type of sitemap is very useful as it allows your visitors to quickly find what they’re looking for without having to go through your website’s navigation. Especially for large websites it’s recommended to have a well-structured sitemap that is linked from every page on your site, for example in your website’s footer.

Sitemaps for Search Engines
The second type of sitemap is a so-called XML sitemap. This type of sitemap is specifically intended for search engines, and it does roughly the same: allowing search engines to find all the content on your website quickly and easily.

Why bother with an XML sitemap then, if it’s the same as a normal sitemap? Because an XML sitemap allows you to include extra information about the content on your site, such as:

• when a webpage was last updated
• how often a webpage is usually updated
• what the priority of a webpage is relative to other pages on your site
• what type of content a webage contains (text, video, etc)

An XML sitemap allows a search engine to quickly and efficiently index all the content on your website, making sure your site is fully spidered and all your content is part of a search engine’s index.

Google recommends every site includes an XML sitemap. You can create an XML sitemap yourself manually, or you could have one generated automatically – ask your site’s web developer about it, or look at Google’s sitemap help pages here.

For larger websites it’s recommended to have a sitemap created automatically, so that whenever you create a new page or update an existing page your sitemap is automatically updated as well.

You can tell Google you have a sitemap by submitting it manually in Google’s Webmaster Tools, or you can include a sitemap reference in your robots.txt file. The second option is always recommended as this way other search engines such as Bing can also find your sitemap.

Need help with sitemaps or other aspects of your website? Get in touch with us at Visual Script, an experienced Northern Ireland Web Design company that can help you with all aspects of your online adventure.

The Importance Of Sitemaps is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

On the most recent edition of the Barcamp Belfast conference I did a 20-minute talk about the mistakes some web developers make when building search engine friendly websites. Much of the content in that talk came from a blog post I did for State of Search about the same topic – SEO for Web Developers. Below are the slides:

Presentation: SEO for Web Developers is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

Earlier this week Google’s Webmaster Central blog wrote about how to effectively geotarget your website. In that article they promised to discuss multilingual websites as well.

And now they have. In a new Webmaster Central blog post published today they discussed the best practices for multilingual websites. Some key take-aways are:

One page, one language
Don’t put two different languages side by side on a single page. Make sure the content on a page is in only one language.

Language-specific URLs
There’s no special need for language-specific URLs from a purely SEO point of view, as Google apparently detects the language straight from the content itself. Though having language-specific URLs is a good usability practice and helps make management of your site a lot less complicated.

Language indicators in the code
Interestingly enough Google says it ignores all language indicators in the code, including the ‘lang’-attribute and doctype declarations.

Character encoding
When using non-English characters in URLs, make sure your document encoding is set to UTF-8. That way URLs containing special non-English characters (such as á, é, ö, etc) are properly escaped to use the encoding of that character.

Full crawling & indexation
Make sure your properly translated content can be fully crawled and indexed by Google. Cross-link your pages in different languages – so for example on your English language page you should link to the German and French versions.

Automated translations
If you can’t afford proper translations and publish content that’s machine-translated, don’t let Google index it. Apparently Google can see automatically translated content as spam due to its low quality.

There’s a couple of other tips in Google’s blog post, so I recommend you read it in detail: Working with multilingual websites.

SEO Factors for Multilingual Websites is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

One of the most important issues European SEOs struggle with is optimising websites that target different countries.

There are all sorts of challenges when dealing with international SEO, such as what domain extension to use, how to structure multiple target countries on a single domain, dealing with country selection without losing link value, how to build incoming links across all countries, and so on.

There have never been any hard rules on how search engines deal with international SEO, leaving optimisers with trial and error exercises to discover the right approach for their sites.

Now Google is lending a helping hand with an extensive post on their Webmaster Central blog, which explains how they attempt to handle different geotargeting factors such as domains & subdomains, directory structure, and Webmaster Tools settings.

For experienced SEOs there aren’t many surprises: Country-level domains are important and probably the best way to target different countries if you can spare the expense. Subdomains are a good alternative, as are country-specific directories on your website.

Duplicate content issues have plagued international SEOs since the dawn of the web. Often it’s extremely hard to avoid duplicate content when your business operates internationally in Europe. Many countries use the same language, so if you want to effectively target all your operating markets you will eventually end up duplicating content in the same language for different countries.

Google doesn’t recommend hiding this duplicate content with robots.txt or noindex tags – I’ve never been a fan of hiding content in this way either, as every page on your website may convey some ranking benefit and I feel you should let search engines crawl the full length and breadth of your content.

What you should do is pick one ‘preferred’ version (ideally the version with the largest target market) and ensure all duplicate versions of that content use the canonical tag to point to the preferred version.

Google does have one interesting revelation though in their geotargeting recommendations:

“Note that we do not use locational meta tags (like “geo.position” or “distribution”) or HTML attributes for geotargeting. While these may be useful in other regards, we’ve found that they are generally not reliable enough to use for geotargeting.”
(Emphasis added)

This might mean that the ‘lang’ HTML attribute conveys no geotargeting benefit, though it’s undoubtedly a useful attribute for browsers and other UAs and helps with multilingual websites.

In upcoming blog posts Google will take a look at multilingual websites and special situations with global websites, so I recommend keeping a sharp eye on the Webmaster Central blog, and I’ll be discussing things here as well.

SEO Factors for Geotargeting Your Website is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

A term often busied by web developers and also SEO agencies is W3C compliance. I’ve written about the benefits of W3C compliant code before, but my perspective has changed a bit over time and I feel it’s important to point out that full W3C compliance is not a definitive requirement for an effective website.

W3C compliance basically means that the HTML and CSS code that a website is built with is fully compliant with the standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C for short).

The W3C is an international standards organization, founded by the inventor of the web. They develop the standards on which the world wide web is run.

You’d think that making sure your website’s code complies fully with these standards is pretty important. And it is, up to a certain point.

You can easily find out if your website’s code is W3C compliant – simply submit your website URL to the W3C Validator tool and you’ll get an overview of all the ‘errors’ in your code. And you’ll almost certainly get a lot of ‘errors’. It’s very unlikely your website’s code complies to all of the W3C’s standards.

I say ‘errors’ because often they’re not really errors. The W3C standards are extremely strict, with no room for interpretation. So every little niggle in your code, every small deviation from the W3C’s strict standards, will generate an error in this validation tool.

W3C compliance for browsers

But most web browsers are flexible pieces of software that are built to deal with a wide range of different sorts of HTML and CSS code, and will probably render your website perfectly regardless of how many errors the validation tool shows.

Often web developers have to use shortcuts and non-compliant code to make something work in a particular way on a website, and while this results in validation errors it doesn’t hinder a website’s functionality at all. Quite the contrary, sometimes you have to break the rules of the W3C to get something to work exactly how you want it in every web browser.

W3C compliance for SEO

There is also the misconception that search engine crawlers require a website’s code to be 100% W3C compliant, or else they will rank your site lower in the SERPs. A lot of SEO agencies recommend you make every webpage on your site fully W3C compliant.

This is often a costly endeavour, and quite unnecessary. Search engine crawlers, like browsers, are sturdy and flexible pieces of software that can index almost any type of code, regardless of the errors it contains.

For proper crawling and indexation a search engine will need to be able to distinguish the different elements of a webpage – style, navigation, and content – and will need to be able to interpret the meaning of the content, which it does through analysing the content itself and the mark-up code that is used to style the content.

Clean, compliant HTML and CSS code help in this process. Compliant code makes it easier for search engine crawlers to identify what the content on a webpage is, and what that content means.

But 100% compliance, meaning zero errors in the W3C validation tool, is not only often hard to achieve (especially if your website has advanced functionality) but is unnecessary as well. The code just needs to be sufficiently well-structured and tidy enough for search engines to be able to distinguish style, navigation, and content.

So bad code is OK?

No, bad code is not OK. It’s still a good idea to strive towards compliant code. A website with hundreds of W3C validation errors is not a good thing. It’s likely that these errors cause the site to display differently in some web browsers (or worse, not work at all) and can cause all sorts of trouble for both users and search engines.

But if your website’s code only shows a couple of handfuls of non-critical errors, especially if they’re only small warnings, there really is little need to fix them.

For on-site optimisation your time and resources are better spent on making sure your website’s title tags, content, and other factors are fully optimised.

W3C compliance – is it a requirement? is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

Recently I’ve been doing a lot of research on microformats and other approaches to structured data. This inspired a post for State of Search where I wonder if the time has come for web developers and search engine optimisers to embrace structured data, or whether we’re better off waiting for a firmer standard to emerge.

State of Search: Microformats and RDF, is this the right time?

A low-level buzz in SEO that’s steadily becoming louder is the use of microformats. This article explores the problems that exist with microformats and RDF and asks if this is the right time to implement these particular approaches to structured data.

Google’s recent legal setbacks in the form of a ruling against it in Italy and strong signals that the European Commission is launching an anti-trust investigation, sparked a passionate defence of Google’s practices from one its highest profile employees, Matt Cutts.

Searchcowboys: Google: “We’re the good guys, remember?”

As Google is coming under ever increasing scrutiny and pressure, it goes ever more on the defensive. Google seems to possess an almost childish naivety about its position as a global corporate giant, and it needs to come to terms with its role as the new Microsoft.

Recent Writings on SEO 2 is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

Often when you do a site-wide update of your design, your content and/or your site structure, it can affect your website’s rankings in search engines negatively. Facing a huge site update project myself, I recently spent some time doing research on how to prepare for a big site update and ensure your high rankings stay high. I wanted to share my findings with you here.

My research soon lead me to an article on the popular Dutch blog Marketingfacts.nl, providing a site migration checklist. The key takeaways from this article are:

• Try to keep your URL’s the same. Use 301 redirects for URL’s that have to change and ensure you redirect all changed URL’s to the content’s new location.
• Don’t change too much too quickly. If you do a redesign, content update and rebrand all in one, too many changes are happening and you’re likely to lose rankings on many keywords.
• Don’t change your domain’s WhoIs information. A changed WhoIs can give search engines the impression your website has changed owners, and they could reset all your rankings across the board.

An article from Jennifer Osborne on SearchEnginePeople.com added several considerations:

• Do a phased change-over: start with a small section of your site and evaluate, then proceed with the rest.
• Keep your internal link structure in mind when doing a redesign. Internal link juice is important as it tells search engine spiders which pages on your site are important. Don’t divert attention from your key pages with a poor structure.
• Track your web analytics and pay extra attention to 404 errors after the migration. This may indicate broken links, both internal and external, pointing to moved or deleted content.

Denver SEO adds the following point:

• Expect to see your rankings drop regardless of your preparations. A 25 to 30 day drop in search engine rankings is normal before levels return to normal or better.

Of course we can’t skip Google’s own recommendations:

• Add and verify your site on Google’s Webmaster Tools.
• Update your submitted Sitemap XML file to reflect the updated site.
• Keep track of crawling errors to detect 301 redirect problems and 404 errors.

And here are a few other tips I came across on various sites and blogs:

• Create a custom 404 error page to try and minimize the impact of broken links.
• If your site update is significant enough, publish a press release.
• Use search engine marketing to supplement your (temporary) drop in rankings.
• Update your robots.txt file to reflect any changes in off-limits content.

After this research I feel well-equipped to handle the SEO aspect of my own site migration project. If you have any further tips or ideas, please leave them in the comments.

SEO Concerns When Migrating Your Website is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

Web widgets – little pieces of code, often JavaScipt – can add a lot of fun features to your website. Widgets come in all sizes and shapes; sports widgets showing the latest scores and standings, weather widgets with accurate forecasts, widgets that connect to social networks like Facebook, the list goes on. You can find them all over the web. Nearly every major content provider offers widgets that allow you to show their content on your website automatically.

Sometimes a widget can really add useful information and functionality to your website. For example of you have a physical store, a routeplanner widget will help website visitors find your store’s location. If you organize travel trips around sports events, a widget showing the upcoming fixtures will save you the trouble of maintaining this information yourself.

But often widgets are detrimental to the quality of your website. Widgets, especially when used in abundance, tend to make your site look amateurish and cobbled-together. Be wary of this when you see a cool widget and decide it would look awesome on your own website.

Widgets should be used sparingly and only when they add genuine value to your website experience. Don’t just put widgets on your website for the sake of it. For every widget ask yourself if it’s just something you think is cool, or if a user can really benefit from its functionality.

And most importantly a widget need to be relevant to your website. Showing weather forecasts is pretty useless if your website is about providing interim management. However for a website about day trips, a local weather forecast in the day trip area could be handy – though if the weather there is consistently bad, it might actually hurt your business.

In short, if you want to use widgets on your website, do so with caution and awareness.

Using Widgets on Your Website is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

The title of a page, included in your web page’s HTML code between the <title> and </title> tags, is an important yet often overlooked part of your website. The title isn’t an obvious and clearly visible part of a page, so it’s easy to think it’s not something you need to put a lot of effort in to.

That would be a wrong assumption to make, because the titles of the pages on your website are very important:

- The title determines how your page is listed on search engine results.
- The title is the name a page is saved under when someone bookmarks it.
- The title is the first thing a search engine spider looks at.

So page titles are important and you need to make sure every page on your website has a good title.

What makes a good title? There are many different ways of writing good titles for your pages. Here are my tips:

• Be descriptive and meaningful. Make sure a page’s title is a reflection of its content. When that page shows up in a search engine results list, a user needs to be able to quickly see if your page’s content is relevant. A good, meaningful title will encourage users to click on that result and you’ll get additional visitors on your site. Write your title in the form of a short sentence that accurately describes what that page’s content is.
• Keep it short. Search engines limit the amount of text they show in a search result page, and long titles also get cut off in bookmark lists. Try to keep your title at 63 characters or less, as Google will cut off the text there in the search result list.
• Include your site name at the end of the title if there’s space for it. By making your site’s name a part of the title you help visitors who bookmark your site to find that bookmark again. However if your title becomes too long with your site name included, leave it out.
• Capitalize Your Words. Make sure every new word starts with a capital letter. This helps with readability and makes your title stand out a little bit more in a long list of search engine results. DON’T WRITE IN ALL CAPS as that is the internet-equivalent of screaming, and people don’t like being screamed at.
• Segment your title. You can use your title to reflect the structure of your site, and this helps in giving that page proper context and relevancy. An example:

  Linear Retail Scanner – Handheld Barcode Scanners – BarcodeShop

  The first part of the title shows that this page is about linear scanners for retail, and the second part makes clear it falls under the category of handheld barcode scanners. The title finishes with the website’s name (which is fictional by the way). All this takes up no more than 63 characters, so it won’t be cut off in search engine results.

• Don’t overuse special characters like asterisks, hashes, dots or exclamation marks. This trick is often used to attract attention to a page, but it usually ends up annoying your users and risks making your site look like an amateurish spam site.

Writing good titles for every page of your website takes some effort, but it definitely pays off in the end. It will help you get found through search engines, and that traffic will be relevant for your site.

Write Good Titles For Your Web Pages is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

A website is built with HTML and CSS code. This is a bit of a simplification, but it applies in general to most websites. HTML and CSS are the markup tools that determine how your content is presented. Your fonts, the colors you use, the size and placement of your images, all those things are captured in the HTML and CSS codes of your website.

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language and is the granddaddy of internet codes. It describes the basic markup of your content. From bold and italics text to displaying images and laying out tables, HTML does it all.

HTML does have its limitations, which is why CSS was invented. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and it does a lot of what HTML does, and then some. The main advantage of CSS is that you can use it to separate the content of the site from the look & feel. This means that with a proper implementation of CSS you can change the way your website looks without having to make any changes in the content.

Having good code is an important aspect of a good website. The HTML and CSS codes that generate your website’s look and feel need to work properly. If they don’t, several things might happen:

Some visitors using different web browsers might not be able to use your website. Different web browsers handle code differently and can show a user very different things based on the same HTML and CSS code. With shoddy code your website might look fine in one browser, but might be hideous in another. Or worse, it might not work at all.

Search engines like Google that visit your site to look at your content might stumble over bad code. Search engines use little automatic programs called web crawlers or spiders that roam around on the internet to supply the search engines with data. This is called indexing and it happens all the time. If your website uses poor HTML code, web crawlers might not index all your website’s content. This will harm your rankings in search engine results.

So how do you know when your website uses bad code? Fortunately there are many ways to check your HTML and CSS code. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C for short), the international organization that sets the standards for the Internet, has online validation tools that check your website’s code for potential problems.

For your HTML code you can use the W3C Markup validator: http://validator.w3.org/

For your CSS code you can use the W3C CSS validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

These validators are very thorough and will almost always give you a list of errors. Don’t worry, not all of these errors are critical. Errors indicated by yellow or blue exclamation marks (,) won’t cause a lot of problems for browsers or web crawlers and can often be safely ignored.

Errors shown with red crosses () are more important and deserve to be looked at. You should strive to have as few of these as possible, though with any complex website you’ll find it almost impossible to eliminate all of them.

Good HTML and CSS code for your site has many benefits, but most of all it will help your visitors receive the website experience you want them to.

Check Your HTML and CSS Code is a post from: The Great Websites Blog