Importance of HTML Sitemap

Sitemap and your Website

If you visit any website, you will find a fine print usually at the bottom which says “sitemap”. This link takes you to a page where the website’s organizational structure (page wise listing) will be there. One can call it as hierarchical listing of a website structure.

A sitemap has got important presence and role in overall website structure.

• It gives an easy navigation option to the website visitors. A visitor can jump to various sections of the website looking at the sitemap without getting lost in the website. Navigational menus can be confusing, so sitemap is used to aid visitor navigation.

• It organizes various sections, themes of a website in proper way. Thus a visitor can get a feel of the website and also a broad structure of the website. Thus, it helps in giving visitor an idea about the website theme and scope.

• Now, sitemap also plays an important role with respect to SEO. Implementation wise, a sitemap is a single page, which has links to all the pages of the website. When a search engine crawler comes to a sitemap, it gets all the links of the pages of a website. Thus, a sitemap helps search engine crawlers in crawling all the links and indexing all the pages of a website.

The key aspect is to create a sitemap and place it strategically on the home page so that when search engine crawler comes to the home page, it gets the link to the sitemap and it can crawl all the links specified in the HTML sitemap. Creating sitemap is bit tedious job but the benefit it provides far exceeds the efforts spent in creating it.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Anchor Text and SEO

Importance of Anchor Text in SEO

What is an Anchor Text?

An Anchor text is the text which is the visible pat of a hyperlink. For example, "SEO services Bangalore". The hyperlink is pointing towards http://www.himshilp.com/ but the text is “SEO services Bangalore”. This text is known as anchor text.

Anchor Text is used to describe the summary of the target page. In above example, the page http://www.himshilp.com/ gives details about the SEO Services and various other services provided by the firm Himshilp which is a Bangalore based firm, so the anchor text “SEO Services Bangalore” is justified.

Anchor Text gives an idea to the visitor of a particular page that what is in store for him if he clicks a particular link on that and move to another page. Thus anchor text indicates the nature and type of content on the target page. This increases the importance of the page and enhances the relevance of the target page.

A brief on the importance of the Anchor Text

• Use of keywords in the anchor text increases the possibility of target page getting higher position in search engine rankings. Reason: Anchor Text increases the relevance of the target page.
  
• Anchor Text is liked by the search engines as they can give weight age to the target page based on the text used in the anchor text.
  
• A good interlinking of pages within a website using Anchor Text increases the changes of the website in attaining high search engine rankings.
  
• While doing link building, ensure that the Anchor Text you are using are relevant to the target pages of your website. Use keywords intelligently to increase relevance and weight age of your website pages.

To sum up, you must use Anchor Text Optimization as a part of your SEO strategy effectively. Search engines love them so you must use Anchor Text to benefit your website.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Internal Linking and SEO

How does Internal Linking Helps?

The links coming to your website from outside that is other websites matters a lot. The inbound links help the website and the page in terms of increased weight age for PR calculation. The links received from any external website / source is one part of the overall linking program of your website.

What about the internal links within the website? This is a very important technique for SEO which is ignored by many websites. The more internal linking you have, more suitable your website is for crawling. In fact some improvement in the internal linking, navigation can improve your visibility in search results drastically.
There are few factors which are required for improving internal linking of a website

• Easy to understand sitemap: En easy to understand sitemap can be a well beginning. It is an important element of any good website. It serves two purposes, firstly it can give crawlers a good starting point to crawl all the pages on a website and secondly it can give visitors also a place to start looking for the information they need.
  Tip: While setting up a sitemap, use your internal directory structure to group the links within a heading. This gives a neat, uncluttered site map.

• Footer Links: Footer links are placed at the bottom of the page. This also services two purposes, first it helps the crawlers to crawl the entire site and second it helps the visitors to jump to other page in case the page is very long. They need not to go back to the top of the page to navigate to other pages. I short; it facilitates movement of crawlers and visitors within the website.

• Using Menus: Menus are the best possible tools for navigation. They guide the visitors to the various pages and sections of the website. Similarly the crawlers also follow menus and move around the website. This is the one of the way to facilitate the deep crawling of a website. For this purpose, the menus should be in a readable format for crawlers. Avoid having FLASH menu items as it can confuse the crawlers. Though they can read if but why to make it complex for them. Feed crawlers with easy to understand HTML menus so that they can do their job effortlessly, this is what an objective of SEO is, isn’t it?

Use a judicious mix of the keywords while strengthening the internal linking structure. A good structure helps crawlers to crawl properly and better search engine rankings and it helps visitors too to find the relevant page of your website thus improving sales conversions.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Simple Pay Per Click / Cost Per Click Strategy

Simple Pay Per Click / Cost Per Click Strategy

In a Nutshell, Pay Per Click or PPC is a search engine marketing technique which is used by search engines and advertising networks to generate clicks. In this, advertiser uses potential key phrases and bid for their position in the sponsored links section to generate leads to their website. The major service providers in the area are Google Ad words, Yahoo – Overture program, MSN Ad center. Apart from these BIG 3, there are many smaller programs which comprises the PPC universe. Setting up PPC sounds simple, but it requires certain practices and constant monitoring as improper biddings can make an advertiser bankrupt overnight.

Below are the simple strategies, which can make your PPC campaign more result oriented.

• Keywords research: Always do good keywords research and come up with as many keywords / key phrases as possible, related to your product / Service. Come up with more and more secondary keywords which are relevant to the service / product offered by you. A secondary keyword may not have good search volumes but can certainly improve your conversion rates.
• Create proper landing page: A landing page is the page on a website where the traffic generated through PPC program lands. Always make good. Attractive landing pages. A home page can not be a landing page as it is the identity of your website. Home page is used to present corporate identity, its more on “Who you are” whereas a landing page should focus on “what service / product you offer” and “why customer should buy from you”.
• Write Relevant Ad Copy: The ad copy should clearly mention the product / service on offer for a particular campaign and the pricing for it. Any deviation from this will make you lose the space. An ad copy with pricing catches attraction of the visitor, thus making CTR (Click Through Ratio) value high.
• Conversions: Incorporate conversion tracking code. Without this, you will not be able to know the exact ROI. One must measure the leads coming through PPC programs, this helps in utilizing the budget effectively.
• Bidding: Test the ROI, conversion for various places in the sponsored link category by varying the bids for 2-3 weeks. This will give you the optimal position where you can safely bid and get desired CPA (Cost per acquisition) and can stick to your allocated monthly budget without much hassle. One you do this, you will understand that bidding for top positions is not good always.
• Check competition: Look at the ad copy used by your competitors, analyze them and if required, make changes in your ad copy. Use promotional “HOOKS” (offers) to increase CTR.
• Branding: Do not let your affiliate to use your brand name for making their ad copy. This may affect your branding.
• Monitoring: Constantly monitor your campaigns, there is nothing like AUTO PILOT in PPC campaigns. The competition is cut throat and you will need to adjust your bid in order to optimize your ROI.
• REALISTIC expectations: Have realistic expectations with your campaigns. You can not increase your business 10 folds overnight using PPC campaigns. It’s a market where you are selling goods and services. You can get the leads but if your website is not up to the mark or your pricing does not suit visitor, you will not get final CONVERSION. So ideally first step before setting up PPC programs is to do proper home work. Make your website up to the mark, create good landing pages, provide information in great detail so that the visitors get a complete idea about your services, products, pricing etc.
• Last but not least, do monthly tweaking in bids, ad copy, remove non performing ads from your campaigns. This is life weeding, removing unnecessary items from your campaigns.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp