"Obviously everyone wants to have great sitemaps and they're definitely useful for us for crawling new and updated content." - John Mueller, Google

Google Webmaster Central's latest Hangout is just another verification from Google that sitemaps are not going anywhere and are still an important tool that aids in crawling and indexing your website. A webmaster asked about why his breadcrumb was being displayed inconsistently in search results and how to fix it. John explained that "In general that means our algorithms are trying to do something different than what you are trying to do, and those are the things that we bring back feedback to the team. Usually, they are not able to manually tweak that for individual sites. He then explains to the viewer about the fact that sitemaps have no relation to Rich Snippets.

Ever increasing in modern times, effective keyword research is an important skill for those embarking on digital marketing. Not only must these individuals know how to develop a good list of keywords for SEO and PPC (pay-per-clicks), but content marketers that are smart will use keyword research to discover what topics they should be writing about and what phrases they should be putting to use while writing. By the time you have landed here you already know just how important it is to do research on keywords. But how can it be done in the most effective way? There are so many research guides for keywords available on the internet and they will all tell you the three main things that you'll need to do:

Critics of search engine optimization (SEO) say that if it is not dead now, it will be dead soon. This is simply not the case. The current circulation of information says that search engines are shifting away from traditional SEO, in order to focus on higher quality content. There is no shift away from traditional SEO; it will need to work side by side with good quality content from now on to compete for higher rankings in search engine results. All of this simply means that quality of the content, rather than solely the little details that aid in bad content, will aid in ranking better in search engine results. Those that believe the naysayers are wrong trust that high-quality content is important, but not more important than proper SEO, and that the two must work cohesively to provide quality content that will rank high.

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of changing the visibility of a website or webpage within the unpaid portion of a search engine results page. This unpaid portion is sometimes referred to “organic”, “natural”, or “earned”. More often than not, the higher ranked on this search results page and the more frequently that the site occurs on the search results page, the more visitors that it will get from the users of the search engine. These visitors likely then become converted into customers. Search engine optimization can target several different searches like video search, image search, news search, academic search, and searches that are industry-specific. SEO is different from local search engine optimization, simply because local search engine optimization is focused on enhancing the online presence of a business so that search engines will display the pages when a user has entered a local search for the product or service.

Traditional SEO stays more focused on national searches. When used as a marketing strategy on the internet, SEO is based on how search engines work, what individuals are searching for, and the search terms or keywords that are being typed into search engines, along with which search engines are being used by the target audience. SEO can include things liked: editing content, HTML, and code to increase its relevancy to particular keywords and to remove barriers so that the site can be properly indexed by search engines. SEO can be something like increasing the number of backlinks or inbound links of a website. As time goes on, SEO strategies are changing, as now more searches are being performed on mobile devices than on desktops, so SEO for mobile websites is getting off of the ground. All of the major search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) have their primary search results, so it is vital that a website be optimized to show up for any of these that show results based on what is relevant to the user's search query. All of these search engines crawl, index, and retrieve content in order to deliver what is most relevant.

Every website owner and online entrepreneur wants to succeed, hungers for the best search results and is willing to do anything to make it t the top of the search engines result pages through increased traffic to the site. Search engines optimization is a complex process that takes time and lots of resources to be realized. New algorithms are frequently released by the search engines led by search giant Google are frequently unleashing new updates aimed at ensuring that only the best and deserving websites attain higher rankings in SERPs. In as much as different experts hold different opinions about the influence of the Sitemaps’ influence on SEO, one thing that cannot be ignored is that, when you create a sitemap, you will complement your company’s SEO efforts.