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2023/12/05 2023/12/05

What exactly are XML site maps?

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Technical SEO

Written by: Ryan Walsh

05th of December 2023

 

Introduction

XML site maps are important because they can help ensure that all the pages and blog posts on your website get indexed by Googlebot.

Its also a piece of cake to create an XML site map, you can simply submit your XML site map to Google Search Console.

This is important because it acts like a map for Googlebot, a set of directions, as to what to index.
Googlebot will have a complete list of all the blog posts and pages to know where to crawl and index every page.

 

So, what exactly is an XML site map?

An XML sitemap sounds complicated; however, it is actually really simple; an XML site map is simply a file, sometimes using something as simple as Microsoft Notepad, which contains a full list of all the URLs on your website that you want to have indexed by Googlebot.

It’s also important to update your XML file on a regular basis, sometimes, they an XML file will automatically update, but if you are keeping the document updated yourself, remember to add new pages and new blog posts to the list to make sure they get indexed by Googlebot.

 

How can an XML site map help to improve our business’s organic SEO?

By adding to Google Search Console, a complete XML file, this will help Google to understand a complete list of all the blog posts and all the main pages on your website so that they can be crawled and indexed.

Also, suppose you make any subsequent changes to these pages. In that case, they can get re-indexed and therefore Googlebot will notice these changes, and Google’s algorthim, may then rank that page higher or lower in the SERP’s.

So what this mean is if you want your business to appear within Google’s organic results, first of all, the page will need to be crawled and indexed.
If the page is not crawled and indexed by Googlebot, it will not able to appear within Google’s results.

 

Does my business need to have an XML site map?

Regardless of how many pages your website has, whether its just ten pages or perhaps 10 million pages, we would always recommend having an XML site map added to your companies Google Search Console account.

For many different reasons, a significant page can sometimes be missed by Googlebot. Simply meaning, it doesn’t get crawled and indexed; therefore, it won’t appear in Google’s organic results, so we recommend creating an XML site map.

Otherwise, a significant page might not be crawled and indexed. Therefore, you could be missing out on sales, thats because that page does not appear in Google’s results.

 

Do you own a WordPress website?

If you have a WordPress website, you can use free plugin like Yoast SEO. This is simply a brilliant pluggin, and they can automatically create an XML site map for you.

You can also automatically generate an XML site map with other quality SEO tools, such as Screaming Frog.

Google Search Console

Regardless of the size of the business you run, whether you have a website of just seven pages or a company with a website of 7 million pages, we recommend owning a Google Search Console account and adding an XML file.

 

We can improve your business’s Technical SEO

Adding an XML site map is just one way you can help improve your business’s technical SEO.

Our highly skilled SEO consultants will analyse whether there is any indexation issues with your website and we can start to resolve these issues.

We can also add internal links and also make your company website faster.

Some of our SEO consultants have over ten years of experience improving our client’s SEO; therefore, if you pick our search engine optimisation business, you will choose one of Wales’s most highly experienced digital marketing companies.

We currently work with a wide range of clients, helping to improve their technical SEO, we also work hard to improve their on-site and also off-site seo. Many lawyers and large e-commerce businesses work with various us, because we have a proven track record of helping companies increase their sales.

If you would like a free quotation, why not call us today? And we can advise you on how it can improve your businesses off-site, on-site seo, and also your companies technical seo.

 

 

 

 

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2023/12/04 2023/12/04

How to best use internal links on your company website

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How to best use internal links to improve your business’s organic SEO

Date: 04/12/2023

Written by: Ryan Walsh

Internal links can help improve your company’s search engine optimisation. For example, using internal links effectively can help keep potentially thousands of shoppers on your website longer. They can also reduce your business’s bounce rate and help your shoppers find different products they may wish to purchase.
Let’s say you write a comprehensive article explaining the best electric vehicle to buy that year, and your company offers various leasing deals, well you might wish to add internal links to the pages where the customer can express an interest in the product- for example requesting a call back from a sales person.
For example, they could click the internal link, and then they could view the cars details and fill in a simple form for a callback.

 

How does internal linking help improve a business’s organic SEO?

Internal links help both shoppers and also the search engines such as Google and Bing to crawl and index new pages.
Internal backlinks can be used by the search engines to crawl and index internal links, they can start to understand the website hierarchy structure and which pages are more important than others.

For example, if the page with the most links on your website, is to with “roof replacement”- then its likely the main service your business offers is roofing services.

Google can also gain an appreciation for all of the different services and products you offer, and by following these internal links, they may discover a brand-new page you have just published, such as a blog post, and Googlebot may crawl and index that page.

 

Great for shoppers

Internal links are also great for shoppers because if they are not interested in that particular product, they could click the internal link and view a different product.
Whereas if you did not offer that internal link, they might have bounced off the website and gone to a competitor’s website.

What exactly are internal links? And how do you add one to the page?

Adding an internal link is an absolute piece of cake if you have a CMS, like a WordPress content management system.
You can simply put the cursor over the text, highlight the text you wish to use as the anchor text, click the link button, and the hyperlink is created.
For example, you might have written a blog post promoting your businesses ten best selling products you sell; why not add internal links to the pages selling those products?

What is anchor text?

Those who don’t know much about SEO, may be under the false assumption that it’s best to keep highlighting the words, they want to improve the SEO for.
However, this is a common mistake that a lot of businesses make. Instead, you need to add internal links that will help the shopper; it’s all about being practical and helpful guiding the shopper to the right products. If you over optimise by adding too many internal links and using exact match anchor text, this can cause large SEO problems.
This means you should must only use the anchor text to accurately describe the page or blog post that it leads to in a way that helps the shopper fully understand what is being sold on that page.
For example, if you sell dog coats and keep overusing the anchor text dog coats excessively, this could even lead to a penalty from Google, which will massively and adversely affect your business’s seo.

 

404 and 410 status codes

As you add internal links, it’s essential that all of these are functional and working correctly; if too many of them lead to a page, which causes a 404 error, which is simply means page not found, then this could lead to a poor user experience.

Therefore, this could adversely affect your business’s seo.

Therefore, it’s worth using a quality seo tool, such as Screaming Frog, to see if there are any 404-page errors and whether these can be fixed.

 

Make sure that people can see the internal links

Many people purchase products and services on their smartphones; if they read a blog post, and they can’t see the internal link because it’s not highlighted- then could mean that they don’t see the internal link. So do make sure the text is not a different colour from the main text, as otherwise they are unlikely to click on it.

So do talk to your web designers. When an internal link is added, we recommend the word be underlined, perhaps make the text a different colour so it stands out.

 

Avoid keyword stuffing

This again continue on from our previous point that we made earlier, in that let’s say that you want to rank for “organic chocolate”, in Googles organic results; , then you shouldn’t mention this too many times in the article, to the point the text reads unnaturally, because it could be considered to be written in an unnatural way, which could lead to a penalty.

Equally, what you don’t want to do is to keep using the exact anchor text repeatedly as , again, this will lead to a penalty.

 

It helps to reduce the bounce rate

By using internal links effectively, you can help guide your shoppers to products or services they might want to buy. So it’s a bit like driving down the road; instead of seeing a block end and thinking we must turn back, you could offer a diversion, an alternative route.

For example, they might land on the page to view a well known brand washing machine, but you might want to say the simple block of text: why not also look at our other washing machines- we also stock these brands? Then, you can use anchor text to recommend different brands, and they may wish to click on these because they are instantly recognisable brands and might want to look at those products as well.

What you have, therefore, done is help the shopper find a different product-rather than just leaving the page, and increasing your companies bounce rate.

Consequently, you have helped to reduce the bounce rate, as they might have left the page and gone to a competitor’s website otherwise, and bought the goods from their.

 

Experienced seo experts

We have been helping businesses of all sizes all across Wales succeed with their search engine optimisation. We have helped companies to increase the number of sales they make dramatically; if you would like a quote for us to help your business, why not call us?

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2023/12/01 2023/12/01

Why you shouldn’t keyword stuff your business’s content marketing

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SEO

Written by: Ryan Walsh

01/ December /2023

It’s an SEO technique you don’t see used that often because most businesses, including their marketing agencies, know it is simply a black hat SEO practice and, therefore, should be avoided like the plague.

 

So, what exactly is keyword stuffing?

So, keyword stuffing is simply placing words or phrases you want your business to appear on Google by repeatedly mentioning them within the written text. Also, within the other elements of your business SEO.

So, for example, you might repeatedly write them within the meta title and meta description. However, this is an absolute surefire way for the business to incur Google penalties, and sometimes, it can even take years to recover from. So, our best advice is to write the sentences naturally, not keyword stuff.

You might have read an outdated blog post by mentioning keywords within the text many times; this will help improve your business’s search engine optimisation.

You should write your content marketing in a way that is helpful to the reader. Therefore, count how many times you need to input the keywords because if you naturally write the sentences, you will need to know how many times you enter the keywords.

Google’s crawl bots are super clever at detecting spam, so if you write the keywords too much, this is likely to result in the business incurring a penalty.

So, for example, if you sell aluminium ladders and want to rank for that on the first page of Google within the organic results if you mention this product too much, it is likely to mean the business will incur an algorithmic penalty.

Avoid these methods of SEO as well:

 

Cloaking

Again, this is a black-hat method of SEO and should be avoided. Simply when you make the text the same colour as the background, therefore rendering the text invisible. This will trigger an algorithmic penalty, severely damaging your business’s search engine optimisation.

 

Bounce rate

So, let’s say that somebody wants to find some advice to solve a problem they might have. So, for example, somebody might be fixing their car, and they can’t get the fuel open.

If you write a beneficial article explaining how that model car, you can fix the problem by purchasing a particular product, which is likely to be proper content marketing; therefore, you might sell more products.

If, on the other hand, you use keyword stuffing, and you keep mentioning the brand of the car and the problem, and then try to offer some links to the product. The person reading the text will likely get annoyed because it will read. Naturally, you won’t provide valuable advice; therefore, the bounce rate is expected to go through the roof.

If the bounce rate is exceptionally high, Google will notice that the bounce rate has increased, meaning that your website is likely to be deemed spam.

 

 

Demote or remove altogether.

Some people, especially those who don’t know much about search engine optimisation but want to improve their own businesses’ SEO, might not fully appreciate the severity of a Google penalty. Still, they most certainly should because it could massively reduce the number of organic visitors.

For example, you could go from having 10,000 visitors a month to not having any organic visitors after a Google penalty, meaning you don’t have any sales. You might have to increase your PPC to gain customers.

 

 

Panda Update – February 24th, 2011.

 

What was the Panda Update – February 24th of, 2011?

We assigned a quality score to web pages, which was used for ranking and page authority.

I checked for ‘thin content’, user-generated spam and keyword stuffing.

Many SEO consultants widely think that the Google Panda Update analysed if the page was spam; for example, was keyword stuffing used or is the work content marketing content thin?

Suppose the work is content-thin, which doesn’t offer much helpful or valuable advice. It might also have a meagre word count, so it doesn’t cover the topic in detail. In that case, this work will likely be deemed low quality, negatively impacting your business’s SEO.

Updates to this algorithm over the years have made penalties and fixes quicker.

 

 

Hummingbird – August 22nd, 2013

The Google Hummingbird update of August 22nd, 2013

Better results with search intent.

This critical update incorporated latent semantic indexing, producing more accurate results.

 

The Google Bert – October 22nd, 2019

Focused on ‘poorly written content’, we recommend writing the work in a Microsoft Word processor so that you can check for spelling mistakes; this update also looks for keyword stuffing.
Websites that use keyword stuffing would incur a penalty.

 

 

 

 

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2023/11/28 2023/11/28

How to improve your business’s local SEO, so that it appears within the Google Maps results

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Date 28/11/2023

Local SEO

 

Has your business got a Google My Business account, yet when you look for it on Google you don’t see it in the Google results.
You want the business to appear in Google, my business results, but it doesn’t seem to be showing there at all.

According to reliable data from Bright Local, 98% of shoppers, look on the Internet for information about local businesses and nearly 33% of them carry out a local search for a business multiple times a week.
This could range from looking for a local pizza shop, right through to a local accountant, but quite simply put, if your company, regardless of how large a business is it’s not showing up in the Google My Business results, well you could be missing out on a huge amount of business.

A lot of companies, simply make the mistake, that they can set up a Google My Business account and then they think, that in a matter of minutes, the business will appear in the results. They might also falsely believe that the sales are just going to start rolling in overnight.

However ever since the Google Possum update, the number of businesses that were displayed in the business results has greatly reduced, often from seven businesses down to 3.

So, let’s say for example that you run a business, that offers mortgage advice, now, you are often competing with a large number of other companies to get your company to appear in the Google My Business results.

Therefore, to get your business in the Google My Business results, wallets often involve a lot of work, and it can’t be instantly completed it often needs a substantial amount of work, creating business citations that, also make sure that the company’s NAP nation can be crawled and indexed on the website, this often means placing it in the footer and also putting it on the contact page of the website as well.

 

Relevance

This is why, it’s so crucial to accurately describe your business in a business description. Also, when you are allowed to select your business sector, make sure that you accurately describe the business, for example, somebody might pick a rather generic business classification, such as gardening services, when really what they specialize in is tree surgery, therefore by simply not speaking the correct business classification, you could have your business appear for work that you might not necessarily.

This is why you must take your time, to accurately fill out all of the boxes, and to make sure that your business is listed as offering the right services and products.

 

Distance

The algorithm will simply calculate the distance from where the person is, to your business, it will know these two bits of information from the Google My Business account, as it will mention your business address, it will also know where the shopper is if they have their location data switched on their smartphone,

If the shopper is closer to your business, they might only be less than three minutes away, well that company years much more likely to appear, than one which is 17 miles away, because the algorithm will believe that the person wants convenience, therefore, they will want a more local business.

For example, if you fancy really tasty, nice woodfired pizza, well you’re going to want it delivered to your door at least lukewarm if it’s coming from a company that is based on the other side of Cardiff, well going to get to your doorstep rather cold.

So, what Google does is prioritize businesses that are closer to the shopper, for example, you might need a new power tool, let’s say drill, and you have a DIY task you want to complete.

Therefore, what Google will do is show your local businesses, that are close to where you are at that moment in time, making it more convenient for you to find the products and services that you require.

 

Prominence

Here is where there is a bit of a crossover between having a good location for your company, and also how successful your Google My Business will be in drawing in new customers.
So for example, let’s say you have an excellent location on the high street and there is a lot of footfall and passing cars which will see your business.

It is therefore much more likely that you will get more customers into your business, yet at the same time it’s also much more likely that you will obtain more Google My Business reviews, which is a massive deciding factor on whether your company appears in the results or not.

So, for example, let’s say that you run a restaurant, if your business accumulates let’s say 100 positive reviews, and people will say how great the food is, the atmosphere, and also the staff, well this means your businesses are much more likely to appear in the Google My Business results, compared to a business that hasn’t had any feedback from customers via reviews.

 

So how do you get your business to appear in Google Maps, a step-by-step guide

 

Knowledge panel

 

Let’s say that somebody wanted to quickly find your company’s phone number, well even if your business doesn’t appear directly in the Google My Business results, what it can help is for customers to find the information they require by simply asking Google.

A knowledge panel will then appear, so whether you want to know the phone number or the address it’s there, and with a click of a button, you can simply call the business.

 

Create business citations

This can take some time to complete, and it can feel like you are going around in circles, simply because you have to keep entering the same information, such as the company’s name, address, and phone number repeatedly many different websites.

So, this work is sure, rather repetitive however what it can do is reinforce your company’s NAP information, and the should match with what is mentioned on your website, and also on your company’s Google My Business account.

Therefore, when this all matches it gives Google greater confidence that your business is based there, at that location, that your phone number is correct, and that the name of the business also matches, this gives your company a much better chance of appearing in the Google M my business results.

Plus, also you have to be careful when building business citations because what you want, is for every single one of those to match exactly. If they don’t, and let’s say for example some say the company’s board address, where you are based let’s say three years back, and others your new address, this can cause what are known as conflicting citations.

 

Which basically can damage your business’s local SEO.

 

Keep your Google My Business account

It’s also important, to try and keep your businesses Google My Business account as up-to-date as you possibly can. This will help to keep your customers much better informed, for example, let’s say that you fancy closing your company a little bit earlier on a Friday afternoon,

Well, if you don’t update your then you’re likely to have customers knocking on the door, and being more than frustrated because they may have driven 30 minutes to get there, and instead of an open sign on the door it simply means closed.
So, what you want to do is to keep your business Google My Business account as up-to-date as you possibly can.

This also includes the address and phone number,

 

Your web designers should add schema

Adding schema is relatively easy to do, and what does is highlight your company’s NAP information so that it can be much easier read by Googlebot.

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2023/11/27 2023/11/27

The “Google Over Optimisation Penalty”-was your company website adversely affected?

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Google Updates

Web Spam

For those of us who regularly read blog posts regarding SEO, you will likely have read countless articles explaining how Google is working very hard to remove spam from its index.

For example, pages which use a lot of “keyword stuffing”, “spun content marketing”, or simply “content thin” pages. Google’s algorithm is actively looking to remove these pages from its index.

What exactly are the Google updates targeting?

 

High-quality SEO

So, there are no two ways SEO is hard work. It can take many months to see any results, which can mean sometimes dedicating hundreds of hours to try and improve a business’s organic search engine optimization.

So, it can take up a considerable amount of time. You need to have a lot of expertise to do SEO correctly, and you need to ensure that you’re following the best “white hat methods”, which are fully explained in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Needless to say, when anything is hard work, we mean millions of companies looking to take shortcuts and not put in the hard work that’s needed.

This can result in the business incurring an “algorithmic penalty” from Google, sometimes resulting in a massive loss of organic visitors to the company’s website.

That’s exactly what this update did to many websites; it analyzed pages, as well as blog posts, to look for low-quality content marketing and penalized those pages by either removing the page from Google’s index or simply lowering it to a position on Google where it’s likely to have little or no organic traffic because it might be repositioned onto page 10.

 

 

Do you have keyword-stuffed pages?

Suppose you’ve hired the wrong SEO company, a business that doesn’t know what it’s doing in that it’s not following white hat methods or Google’s Webmaster guidelines. In that case, the marketing company may have created low-quality pages.

For example, suppose your business sells a particular brand of handbags, and they hire a rubbish marketing company. In that case, the content writer might mention that handbag brand repeatedly throughout the article.

If the work reads unnaturally, in that it’s not offering helpful advice to the shopper, it keeps repeating the exact keywords, so the blog post reads like a broken record.

What we mean by that is the article has the keywords mentioned way too much, in an excessive way. The Google Over-Optimisation Penalty (Penguin Update) would likely have impacted that page or the entire website.

 

 

Spun content marketing

Many businesses, because they need to produce over 100 blog posts, sometimes make the wrong decision and use spun content marketing. We would not recommend using this technique; it’s a surefire way to damage your business’s search engine optimization and incur a Google penalty.

 

 

Excessive and over optimized anchor text

We would say that something your business should avoid is using unnecessary, over-optimized and excessive internal backlinks.

So, what do we mean by this?

Well, let’s say that you sell a product, and that item is, let’s say, cordless drills, yet instead of adding internal links, that would help the shopper to find the power tools that they would like to buy. Instead, the marketing company uses excessive over-optimized anchor text on a page, mentioning “cordless drills” in the anchor text excessively; this is likely to lead to over-optimization.

Instead of helping the shopper find the product they need, you will try to write the keywords that you want the SEO to improve for within the anchor text; however, this could lead to over-optimization issues and a Google penalty.

So, instead, make sure you write the anchor text in a “white hat” way and help shoppers find the right items they may like to purchase.

 

 

Would you like us to increase your business’s sales?

We have worked with many companies; some of these businesses are very well-known brands here in the U.K.

We have helped some of these businesses drastically increase the number of organic sales that they make each month. Whether you are completing SEO in 2023 or perhaps in 2030, what’s important is the focus on quality.

Always follow white hat methods of SEO.

 

 

 

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