If you’re running a website, it’s important to have a sitemap. A sitemap is a map of your website that shows the reader all of the different pages and sections on your site. Sitemaps also help search engines crawl and index your website more efficiently.
There are a few things to keep in mind when creating a sitemap for your website. First, make sure that all of the important pages on your site are included in the sitemap. You don’t want to leave anything out or it will be harder for people to find what they’re looking for. Secondly, try to keep the sitemap as simple as possible. You don’t want it to be too complicated or confusing. Lastly, make sure to update your sitemap regularly. As you add new pages or content to your website, be sure to add them to the sitemap so that people can find them.
Following these best practices will help ensure that your website has a sitemap that is effective and helpful. Including a sitemap on your website is a great way to help people navigate your site and find what they’re looking for.
5 Sitemap Examples That Showcase Best Practices In Action
Most humans are visual by nature, so a visual sitemap might be your cup of tea if that sounds like you.
An HTML sitemap is a clickable link of pages on your site, which can be helpful for users, whereas an XML sitemap is written for Google to easily find all your pages.
To create your visual sitemap, use a free tool like PowerPoint, as they have a useful flowchart feature available.
Here’s what you’ll want to put in place:
- Homepage – Usually shown at the top of a sitemap
- Primary navigation – Also referred to as “parent pages,” considered the main navigation of your website
- Secondary navigation – Also referred to as “child pages” or “secondary pages,” most often seen in a dropdown menu
- Tertiary pages – Located one level deeper than your secondary navigation pages. Often not visible in the site’s navigation (for example, product pages on ecommerce sites)
- Special buttons/CTAs (call to action) – Sometimes, there are direct links to “book a demo” or “contact us” in the menu; make sure to include these, too.
https://www.https://www.searchenginejournal.com/sitemap-examples/462220/
How To Avoid Going Down Google’s Instant Answer Search Trap
For years, marketers claimed victory when their page made it to the first organic listing or even a first page ranking on a Google search results page.
Now zero-click and other featured results deliver answers immediately to searchers and bury those organic links further down (or even off the first) page. What’s a content marketer to do?
Here’s what 10 experts presenting at Content Marketing World suggest.
1. Build brand and community
The instant answers are answers that are easy. Even with featured snippets, if your content is tackling a complex subject matter, Google will still refer people to your site. That said, you want an insurance policy against Google, and that policy contains two things: brand and community. Build both, and SEO will work for you, but more importantly, your marketing will work without SEO. – Christopher Penn, chief data scientist, TrustInsights.ai
https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/articles/google-instant-answer-trap
Google Discusses Zero Search Volume Keyword Targeting
In a Google office hours hangout, Googlers answer the question of whether or not to try ranking for zero search volume keywords.
The person asking the question noted that they’re ranking for keywords that have zero search volume and whether they should target those for ranking purposes.
They asked:
“Let’s say I research on a keyword which has no volume or keyword density, but we are appearing for those keywords on the first page.
Should we target that keyword?”
A Googler identifying themself as Lizzi (likely Lizzi Harvey) answered the question.
She responded:
“…You can optimize for whatever keywords you want.
And it’s not always about the keywords that have the most volume.
I would think about how people should find your page and target those keywords.”
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-zero-search-volume-keywords/464556/
Visual Search Optimization — Whiteboard Friday
Visual search optimization
So what happens with visual search is that you would do some optimizations on your website. Then, the user would do a visual search, and then they might get a different kind of result.
Image SEO
So the kinds of optimizations that you should consider for visual search, which is searches that are made via Google Lens or Pinterest Lens or via Bing’s image search tools, include image SEO around making sure that you’ve got images that are performing well for image SEO with good file formats, titles, alt text, alt tags, schema, all of that sort of thing.
Entities
Also, you’re going to think about the kinds of entities which are within your photos. So visual search recognition software and tools, they can understand lots of different kinds of entities. There are a few that they prioritize in particular, though, and they include logos, landmark, text, and entities, which I’ve called “things” in this particular instance just as a shorthand, but entities that are essentially things that are found within the knowledge graph.
Composition
And then, the other one you want to think about is your composition. So the composition that you have for your image will affect what Google understands the image to be about.
https://moz.com/blog/visual-search-optimization-whiteboard-friday
17 Topics That Result in Rejected Ads on Facebook and Instagram
One common theme ties together many of the words and phrases that Meta prohibits in ads: they relate to personal attributes. Meta disallows personal attributes in ad copy, as they can come across as invasive or make users feel targeted.
Yet not all of Meta’s prohibited words and phrases relate to personal attributes. Others pertain to social and political issues, sensational content, and third-party brands. Let’s take a closer look at each category and review some alternatives to help you avoid having your Instagram ads or Facebook ads rejected.
#1: First Names
On many marketing channels like email or text, using customers’ first names is a great way to add a personal touch. But when you advertise on Meta platforms, this level of personalization isn’t allowed.
Don’t say, “Pat, get custom stationery with your name on it!” Instead, tell your audience about your services without targeting them individually. For example, you might say something like, “We make custom stationery featuring your name.”
https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/17-topics-that-result-in-rejected-ads-on-facebook-and-instagram/
The State of Digital Accessibility: Three Key Challenges
There are a number of reasons why, despite the growing awareness of digital accessibility, expectations of inclusivity, and renewed efforts by the government, we are still lagging behind.
Among those reasons are the following three challenges that reflect that state of digital accessibility today.
Three key challenges in digital accessibility
1. The lack of clarity on legal requirements
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which prohibits discrimination based on disability, and other laws governing accessibility in the United States were written before the Internet became an integral part of our lives. Today, the Justice Department and courts across the country decide on digital accessibility lawsuits on a case-by-case basis, relying on WCAG as a technical standard. But because these guidelines haven’t been codified, for many businesses it’s hard to know with certainty which standards are applicable to them, whether their websites meet legal requirements, and what specific steps they should take to comply with the laws.
2. The dynamic nature of the Internet
Considering the dynamic nature of the Internet and the speed of content creation (more than 250,000 sites are launched every day), it’s clear we need a web accessibility solution that can monitor for accessibility errors in real-time and help fix issues as they come up.
https://moz.com/blog/state-of-digital-accessibility
Google Adds More Options to Manage Ad Assets and Extensions
Google has announced some new updates to Ads Manager that will better enable advertisers to take a broader view of their ad assets and campaigns, and may help to highlight new opportunities, based on new creative combinations, targeting tools, CTAs and more.
First off, Google’s now referring to ’ad extensions’ – like sitelinks, callouts and additional images – as ‘ad assets’, which aligns the broader scope of Google’s new approach to your various add-on elements.
And with the shift to these being viewed as additional assets, Google’s looking to make it easier to manage them as well, by providing a broader overview of the assets that you can include within your campaigns.
Creating Awesome Location Pages and SEO
Leave a Reply