The User Experience Blog for Website Architecture Planning

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.

Regardless of whether you’re a medical office, large e-commerce website or local small to medium sized business, both HTML and XML sitemaps are imperative to the absolute success of your website. In many ways, a sitemap is like a treasure map, a list of pages that can take many forms such as machine-readable XML, an HTML listing of pages names, a list of all of the page URL’s and so on.

For years now content has been king of the marketing game. After all, rock solid content is what keeps your visitors on the page and wanting more, right? Great content is what makes visitors turn into conversions, with a little help from search engine optimization, and both XML and HTML sitemaps. But writing really good content that converts takes time, a lot of energy and research, doesn’t it?

As you probably already know, [optimized] website content and search engine optimization go hand-in-hand. There are a variety of tactics that website owners can use to ensure that the content on their website is top notch and doing its job. SEO optimized content is all about directing search engine traffic to your website—users who are looking for what you’re offering. The hope is that once those visitors get to your website and browse through your pages that they will love what you have to offer and convert into a sale.

All about Sitemaps: XML or HTML Sitemaps or Both?

Regardless of what type of website you run, whether it’s e-commerce, for a small to medium sized business or a large social networking platform that you’re trying to get off the ground, there’s one thing that should always be included: a sitemap. Now, as you’re probably aware, there are a few different types of sitemaps including HTML and XML sitemaps; there is also such thing as a txt sitemap, but they aren’t as popular as they used to be.