Website Architecture Planning | Search Engine Optimization

Technology is making life easier, better and enjoyable. Owning a website is nolonger a reserve of the few with technological know-how. In fact, anyone who can use a MS word can now own and even manage a website without any support from the tech-savvy fellows. This is the good news, but here is the bad. Because everyone can create and own a site, there are currently far too many websites in the world; in fact, a billion to be precise as at October 2014. Most of these websites are very active, and fall under common niches. Large numbers are synonymous with competition, and in this case, all sites are competing for search engines’ attention. If you have the content online, it has to be found by the search engines so that it can be availed to web users.

Bing is the second most powerful search engine after Google. In as much as most people pay close attention to everything Google, using Bing can go a long way in ensuring that your content attains more exposure, attracts more traffic and ranks better in the search engines. If you are yet to create a sitemap for Bing, now is the time so long as your CMS or site can handle it. Alternatively, you can install any of the available sitemap plugins that will take care of all the technicalities for you. In fact, you are always free to use a sitemap generator for this purpose.

You have spent hours or days designing your site, or have it done professionally at a hefty cost by an expert web designer. You have then invested heavily to craft unique content and you cannot just wait to deliver your content to the world and share your experiences, products, services, or whatever information you have in mind. Days fly by and you don’t receive visitors to your website-days may translate into months, and you are almost giving up.  You are wondering what might be wrong, the answer is simple; you site or content has not been indexed.

The number of websites in the world has surpassed 1 billion. This translates to 1 website for every seven people. This has resulted in competition for rankings in SERPs because every website owner wants to be found. Your site’s visibility first depends on the content, which then has to be crawled. This is a bit tricky if you have so many pages full of information, which makes it difficult for Googlebot spider to detect what should be indexed on your site. It is for this reason that Google sitemaps were introduced, which are basically text files with lists of web addresses of all the pages contained on your website.

Approximately half of the world’s one billion websites don’t have sitemaps. If you are among the 50% yet to create a sitemap, then know that you are losing out on an important SEO strategy that can see you sail through the search engines rankings with no difficulty. Thousands of websites are launched every day and millions of web pages created. When they crawl sites, search engine spiders land anywhere on the site, and then move from one page to another with the aid of HTML codes.