One of our clients recently asked us how to get more people to their website and being new to the public website arena myself I embarked on a little journey down the SEO road. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it is exactly that, optimizing your website to generate more hits of greater value.

The most important thing is the Sitemap.  There are two types of sitemaps, the first is a HTML sitemap and the other one that we will be focusing on is the XML Sitemap. No, that is not a spelling mistake; one is spelled with an uppercase S and the other with a lowercase s, no idea why, if you do, let us know. Anyhow, a Sitemap is a list of all the pages on your website. Having a Sitemap is an important part of letting search engines and directories find pages on your website which their crawlers might not discover using their normal methods. We generated ours using the protocol on sitemaps.org, it is the protocol that Google adheres to so I am pretty sure you would want to follow it. Using the above mentioned Sitemap protocol create a XML file in your website’s root named Sitemap.XML(www.bennettstech.com/Sitemap.XML).  It will look something like this

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”UTF-8”?>

<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9”>

    <url>

         <loc>http://www.bennettstech.com/</loc>

         <lastmod>2008-12-02</lastmod>

         <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>

         <priority>0.8<priority>

    </url>

</urlset>

The <urlset> attribute references the protocol standard.  The <url> attribute is the parent tag for each URL entry.  The first child to the <url> parent tag is the <loc> attribute which is the URL of the page.  The other children are all optional fields.  <lastmod> is the date the file was last modified, <changefreq> is the frequency at which the page is likely to change and the <priority> is the priority of this page relative to other pages on your site.

For more information on Sitemaps visit http://www.sitemaps.org/

 

Our next step was setting up our Robots.txt file.  A Robots.txt file is used to instruct web crawlers on what to do with your site.  What we instructed it to do was to ignore certain URL’s when crawling.  The reason we did this was to make sure that when users search for our site they find the URL’s we want them to find, for example we don’t want Google to show our login pages in their search results.  What you need to do is create a text file called Robots.txt at the root of your website (www.bennettstech.com/Robots.txt), the file will look something like this :

User-agent: *

Disallow: /bennettstech.com/login.aspx

For more information visit http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html

 

The next step was setting the Meta tags so that crawlers could index our site better.  For example if you have a site about computers you would want to let the crawlers know that it is about computers.  Here are a 2 Meta tags that you can set to help:

<META name=”description” content=”Bennetts Technologies - Making Your Business Click!”>

Google uses the description tag as a short summary of the page in its search results, if you search for Bennetts Technologies Google shows our name followed by:  Bennett’s Technologies strives to be recognized as the most highly…  So make it short and descriptive.

<META name=”keywords” content=”hardware, software, it, computers, technology”>

These are the keywords the search engine associates with the page, make sure that it is relevant and remember to include synonyms.

For more information on Meta tags visit http://www.philb.com/metatag.htm

 

Once we had finished all of this we registered as a webmaster with Google, MSN and Yahoo.  We submitted our Robots.txt file and our Sitemap.XML file, deployed our changes and then waited for a week.  The results we got from just these 3 changes were very good.  Traffic to the site from search engines had increased by more than 400%. 

So now you can go and increase traffic to your site as well :)