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We’ve talked about keyword stuffing…

When most webmasters start considering optimizing their website, they automatically think of making their website optimized for Google. This is because of the Google’s monopoly in the search industry. Google tries to keep its algorithm unique and has a number of search engine concepts that are unique their search engines. For example, PageRank is unique to Google, and the famed Google Sitemap is specific to Google – a fact that SEO professionals cannot ignore.

We cannot ignore the fact that the importance of Google sitemap for getting good search ranking is increasing. Google has provided this avenue for us and expects us to use it as it makes everything easier when Google crawls the web looking for fresh and updated content. If you want to invite the Google search bot frequently to your website, you must make sure to submit a Google Sitemap.

Google Sitemap is different from the regular sitemap you may have in your websites (an HTML page viewable by visitors for navigation). The Google sitemap is not for public viewing. It is meant for Google’s search bots. Google sitemaps are XML files and they are not available for the visitors on your site. So far, only Google is using this sitemap feature – although other search engines often follow Google’s lead. Since Google controls a market share of 70% in the search industry,  it is very important that you gain visibility in Google to take advantage of Google’s online popularity.

Google’s spiders try to get important information about your website through the sitemap, so if you present it to Google this will help the spiders to crawl and index your website completely. A regular crawl without the Google Sitemap will not guarantee a complete indexing, as a number of pages might not be accessed by the search bots for various reasons.

For example, if you have a simple ecommerce website and your products pages are accessible only through the site’s search feature, then Google’s spider may not access these pages unless you have a way of telling the search bot about those pages. In such cases, having Google Sitemap can ensure that even the products pages that are only reached via search feature are indexed. It is important to have all the pages of your website indexed, since only the indexed pages will feature in the search results. The greater the number of indexed pages you have, the greater your chances are of featuring in the search results.

In addition, the Google Sitemap will tell Google how frequently your website is updated. If your website is frequently updated, but not frequently crawled and re-indexed, then the latest updates may not reflect in the search results because Google will be listing your site according to the information it has in its cache. This means some of your latest offers and promotions may not feature in the search results. A Google sitemap with an update frequency can help keep your site up to date in the search engine’s database, as they will crawl more frequently and update the cached result.

If you have just a 5 page website, you probably will not appreciate the importance of Google sitemap. But there are websites with thousands of pages and it is imperative to have Google sitemaps for such websites. Failing in this area can put such a webmaster in a very disadvantageous position, so ask your SEO firm to add a Google Sitemap to your website!

SEO is by its very nature an extremely time consuming process. This fact can lead many webmasters down the slippery slope of deciding to find a short cut or a quick fix to create links and higher rankings for their site. Some will even go so far as to pay shady SEO firms to do ‘black hat’ SEO for their site, being convinced that they won’t get caught. While some of the methods that respectable firms use are designed to take advantage of search engine’s algorithms and will not trigger any search engine alarms, there are plenty of SEO strategies that are out side the approved methods.

These black hat SEO methods that are not approved by search engines and go against the spirit of search engine ranking. Search engines always try to offer the best information available on any given field in response to a search by a user. By using ‘illegal’, ’unapproved’ or ’black hat SEO’  methods, websites circumvent the true purpose of SEO and can prevent search engines from providing online users with reliable information. Black hat SEO affects the quality of the results delivered to users, and in so doing ruins the reputation of the search engines. Therefore, search engines are basically trying to safeguard their goal of delivering the best match of information and at the same time protect the interests of the other webmasters who follow approved SEO strategies.

Some of the methods used are simple, silly techniques while others are elaborate approaches that try to trick the search engines. Your website’s online reputation can be seriously damaged and you can even be penalized for engaging in any black hat tricks. Using black hat SEO tactics creates a negative image about your company  and it also affects the integrity of your company – no one likes a scam, and that is what black hattery is – a scam perpetrated on search engines and their users.

Black hat techniques try to trick the search engines by making them believe something that is not there or hiding other things that are not supposed to be present; and can also trick the users through various illegal approaches including illegal redirects. Black hat SEOs may try to increase the keyword density of the page by stuffing the page with keywords (in an effort to make search engines consider a particular page  to be the best match for the keywords in question.) There are a few other tricks;  a number of websites have attempted to include keywords in the pages but color the keyword that is stuffed on the  web pages with the same color of the background. This technique presents a different version of the web page to the search engines, since such pages contain text that is not visible to the eyes of a regular visitor.
Stay far away from black hat SEO. Now that you know a few of the tactics, simply steer clear, and have a reputable SEO company help you do organic SEO that will give you high rankings naturally and legally.