Sitemaps are an aspect of web design that has been around from the very beginning. The ideology is simple; create an accessible area of the website whereby users can navigate to any one area of your site architecture easily. A lot of web designers see these pages in the same way a builder would see four walls, a floor and a roof – they are part of the infrastructure and should not be ignored. While this is sound advice the reason and benefits for SEO may not be so transparent.

A sitemap can be a very powerful platform for SEO and I mean VERY powerful and yet it is so simple and often overlooked. Matt Cutts recently asked the question, which would he choose, an XML or HTML sitemap? He chose the HTML sitemap because both users and spiders can use the data. See the full video below:

Now the real benefit of having a good sitemap is the ability to make pages throughout a website accessible to the search engines. Most commonly great chunks of valuable content are hidden away in areas of a site which may seem to follow “SEO protocol”, in terms of URL structure and on page optimisation but for a search engine spider the content is hard to find.

An example of this would be on an e-commerce site whereby the structure follows homepage > category > sub category > products > content.  In the eyes of search engine spiders they have to crawl 4 levels before they can reach the juicy information/content and although Google are getting better at finding content (i.e. Caffeine) it can still help enormously by reducing the number of “obstacles” in their way. The theory is that by including a sitemap accessible from the homepage then Google will only have 1 “obstacle” to have to deal with before finding direct access to the rankable content.

Now to make a really effective sitemap for SEO it requires a little more methodology and architecture. It’s commonly thought that Google will take notice of at least 150 links on any one page before they start losing interest and move on to another area of a website. So for large websites that have thousands or even tens and thousands of pages it’s just not going to work including all your pages on one sitemap page.

So what’s the solution?

The most effective way to deal with high volume content websites is to create separate sitemaps for each website section. This deals with a few issues, firstly your main sitemap page will not go over the maximum number of links therefore all pages will be crawled and given value. Secondly the search engine spiders will still be able to access your deep content much easier than the normal way i.e. homepage > category etc.

The diagram below illustrates how a sitemap can be structured to ensure content can spidered.

For more information Rand explains well why this is an effective SEO technique:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-flat-site-architecture

For those of you thinking – how does this help increase my rankings? Well pages that were not previously indexed will now become listed therefore helping you rank for new terms. Acessibility really is the key here, internally and externally.

The final little treat for those of you that have taken the time to read the entire article; the anchor text used in a sitemap does seem to play an important part in terms of assigning value to those pages. This works on the same method as internal linking, assign keyword relevant descriptions to links in sitemaps and you will see better results than not doing so – tested and proved!

Ok, I thought I’d go back to basics for some beginner SEO’s and those who take an interest in the subject. Anchor text is the name given to the text of a link or a link description, for example in the link SEO Blog, the anchor text is “SEO Blog”.

The anchor text on any website is completely editable and can provide some great SEO value from inside a website and from external websites as well. Essentially the best practice to use in any situation is to provide the most accurate description of what the link destination is as possible. Use the image below as guidance, so for example “Johns Cars” website had 3 important pages about; car engines, types of wheels and cars for sale.

Now what’s important within the internal structure of Johns Cars is what kind of anchor text is used to link to these pages. What you should try and avoid in the setup of your navigation or links within content using unrelated anchor text to link to a page. Terms such as “click here” and “this link” don’t really provide any useful description of what’s at the destination or what users should expect.

If you provide a good description of a page explaining what users can accurately expect to see once they arrive at the link destination then you’re optimising your internal link structure successfully. By doing this you are letting the search engines know what’s on the page, making the destination more relevant to a page with just a “click here” link. See the diagram below to show how internal anchor texts should be used:

This type of method also applies to external links i.e. backlinks. In an ideal world you would aim to have hundreds or even thousands (depending how greedy you were) of links with accurate anchor texts pointing to your content. Google and the other search engines use the anchor text to help determine how useful pages are, and rank them accordingly (this is only a fraction of the ranking algorithm). The only problem is, you have no legitimate way of controlling what anchor text is used to point to your website. What we don’t really want again is phrases such as “this site” or “check this out” – although a link is a link and beggars can’t be choosers!

As the diagram indicates above although these links are pointing to Johns Cars they are not really providing any real added value in terms of anchor text. They are not telling the search engines or users what content should be expected on the website. Not to go too far into detail about getting the correct anchor texts as there are ways such as paid links and link bait but essentially any external links should ideally be keywords you are trying to rank for, so in Johns case, “Cars for sale”, “Types of wheels” and “Car engines”.

Paid links are something that use to be common practice for most SEO’s and agencies – simply spend, spend, spend and thou shall receive. This all changed when Google stated that manipulating search rankings from paid links should be avoided at all costs and if advertising is carried out then the appropriate “rel=nofollow” tag should be implemented to stop the flow of Page Rank.

While many SEOs headed back to the drawing board to think up new and innovating ways to attract links to websites some SEOs have continued to play the paid links game. I’m not one to judge, if you buy links, there are risks, if the pros out way the cons then go for it. There are plenty of large brands out there who have more than obvious paid links strategy, yet never seem to receive any penalties, in fact they seem to get rewarded by great rankings.

I get questions from people and clients asking “is there a safe way to buy links?” well the short answer is no – but there are ways that websites seem to avoid detection which cut risks. From my analysis of competitors over the last 12 months there are methods which are used:

1. Link Brokers – These give you access to a selection of websites that are willing to sell text ads. Usually the system is automated, sellers place code on their sites allowing brokers to distribute links throughout networks. These seem to be the most obvious method that is identifiable by Google.

2. Unrelated content – If you buy links on a website that has no relevance to your own content then what value does this give the users? None. Organic or natural links more often than not will link to relevant content, providing added value to their website and the users that visit the links.

3. Anchor text – In an ideal world every link established naturally would contain keywords and phrases that you want to rank well for. Unfortunately this very rarely happens, natural link growth will include nofollow tags, banners, brand terms and a selection of utterly useless keywords such as “here” or “this website”.

4. Link relationships – Having 100% followed links with targeted keywords will undoubtedly set some Google alarm off somewhere. A natural link relationship look will have a selection of followed, nofollow, affiliate and tracking parameters.

5. Link increase – Something that is often overlooked by other SEOs is the natural versus manipulated link growth. A natural increase will be slow but generally consistent, with maybe a few spikes due to new content and site updates (which I believe Google checks). A manipulated increase will be quick with many spikes and even overall drops – people do forget to pay for their links. See the diagram below to show how a natural link increase usually looks and a blatantly obvious manipulation:

6. Link placement – A sure way to get found out for buying links is placing your link in the footer of a website where there are no other relevant links or too many external links. If you’re stupid enough to think doing this will give you any ranking value or traffic think again. Natural links usually get listed on resource pages, blogrolls, in blog posts (not paid) and perhaps the body of website copy.

7. Looking for Page Rank – It is true, people still search the high seas looking for page rank, alas this will do no good. Content and site relevance plays more of an important role these days than page rank in terms of obtaining high quality links. If a new website suddenly gets 10 page rank 5,6 and 7 links pointing to it then I fear its life in the Google index will be short lived.

At the end of the day as you can see trying to create a paid links strategy is a long, time consuming process which does hold risk. If you get away with it, you’ll achieve great rankings (which many top websites do) but the more rewarding ethical method is of course to create a linkable website with valuable content. Google will undoubtedly have 101 other paid link identifiers in their algorithm, plus they already have the option to report paid links in the Google webmaster console. If a linking opportunity arises be sure that you are within the Google guidelines to be safe.