"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.

Technical SEO Checklist

Many times webmasters will focus on on-site factors when they need to increase their organic growth but much like a vehicle, a website does require behind the scenes maintenance so that it can perform at its best. If your website is falling behind in the ranking, there are definitely some things regarding your SEO that will need to be updated or looked at. When thinking of SEO, it tends to center on on-page factors rather than the technical issues that aren't so pretty. These are all of the tiny little sort of boring things that do not seem like much but actually make a pretty significant impact. All of these technical things are what gives your website the strong foundation that it needs so that it can support all of the great content that you are publishing on it.

When blocking a URL on your website, you are able to stop Google from indexing certain web pages with the purpose of being displayed in Google's Search Engine Results. This means that when people are looking through the search results, they will not be able to see or navigate to a URL that has been blocked, and they will not see any of its content. If there are pages of content that you would like to refrain from being seen within Google's Search Results, there are a few things you can do to complete this task.

When building a website, it is important to build it with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in mind. By doing this from the start of your planning, it will help to ensure less work needs to be done in the future. To have to go back and rebuild a website for SEO will take a lot more time and energy than just doing it right from the start. If you are a business with an already established website looking for suggestions of how to increase SEO rankings, this article can also be beneficial for you. As SEO becomes more and more important in the world of the internet, it is becoming more vital to businesses and how successful they are. Using SEO techniques are no longer an option in today’s digital world. These strategies are a necessity to success.

How Does Google Find Your Website Content?

Through the use of software programs and algorithms, Google gathers web content so that those using Google to search can readily access the information that they are looking for. Because of this, there is very little effort required by webmasters to make sure that Google retrieves their content.

Google Search Console is a free service that will help to monitor as well as maintain a website's presence in Google's search results. It is not necessary to sign up for Search Console to show up in search results, but doing this will aid in better understanding of how Google views websites and how to optimize your website so that it performs better within the search results. Search Console can do so much for anyone who chooses to utilize it—it's great for business owners that delegate tasks, SEO specialists and marketers, website administrators, web developers as well as app developers.

Having the right site structure can no doubt help you with your search engine optimization efforts in the same way that the wrong strategies can have a negative impact. There is not a long list of things that can be done to improve your SEO at the level of the website architecture, but when each of these things are done, bit by bit you will see improvements in rankings. And when done all together, it will reach maximum optimization. Most of these things can be done with very little help from a professional, and when they are implemented at the creation of content, it will become second nature to ensure that all web pages on your site are uniform in their ability to contribute positively to the overall search engine optimization. What's the point of working hard on a website, only to be penalized because of a few simple mistakes? Never let that happen again when you are armed with this sort of information in your pocket.

As some people might not know, it is absolutely free and totally easy to be included within Google's search results with little to no effort on your part. This is because Google is a totally automated search engine that relies on software called web crawlers that explore the internet regularly to find sites to add to their index. Many of the websites listed on Google's search results have not been manually submitted to be included, thanks to the bots that have been crawling the internet periodically. In order to determine if your website is already on Google's index, search for your website's URL. Even though Google crawls and indexes literally billions of websites, it is possible that some get overlooked. When this happens, it likely one of a few reasons; Google got an error when trying to crawl the site, the website design makes it hard for Google to effectively crawl the content, it's a new site that hasn't had time to be crawled yet, or the website isn't well connected from other websites on the internet.

For the majority of the life of the internet, search engine optimization practices have revolved around using plain text versions of your content as much as possible so that you do not encounter content that is dynamically generated, like through JavaScript. As technologies have advanced, this seems to still be an issue for the well-known search engines like Google, but does it have to be? In general, crawlers have historically only looked at raw content that is within the HTTP response body, and did not typically interpret what a normal browser running JavaScript would interpret.

Scraping websites is almost exactly how it sounds—the website content is viewed quickly, and necessary information is gathered and then put into a spreadsheet. The specific information needed is taken and then added to a database where scrapers can store the data. Companies that scrape information from websites can benefit from using this data by being able to keep up with the competition, centralizing data quickly and efficiently, and pricing analytics. The process also allows for loads of unstructured data to be arranged in a more organized way. It allows businesses to gather and analyze useful data that is out there on the internet.

Has there ever been a time that you are looking at your Google Analytics, and noticed a strange influx of referral traffic to your site? You haven't run a special promotion or released a particularly outstanding piece of content and suddenly gone viral. You are not entirely sure what is happening and why. In order to get the correct data that reflects your analytics accurately, you will need to get rid of the referral spam for good. How should you deal with this surprise influx and unwanted spam? Read on carefully to fix the problem.

In order to rank higher in search engine results, your website structure needs to be at its best. Every single website has its own unique structure—being tidy and streamlined, or disorganized and messy. When you plan your web site structure with intent and purpose, you will be rewarded with a website that performs excellent in search results. Here, you'll find some of the best advice on making your website's structure the best that it can be – It will be successfully crawled and indexed by spiders, it will appeal to users, and it will give you the best search engine results listings and rankings possible.

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:

Not too long ago, Google announced that switching a website over to the HTTPS protocol would give it a small boost in ranking. Google, being the ruler of the Internet, should know what's what then, right? Many people have this mentality but it is vital to understand the difference between HTTP and HTTPS, how to switch, and if even making the switch is right for your brand to begin with. To start with, it is vital to ask a few questions; why would Google rather HTTPS for SEO rankings? And what are the benefits of using HTTPS for SEO? It should also be noted that there are a few concerns regarding SEO and changing an HTTP website to HTTPS.

In today’s online environment, there seems to be no end to the kind of websites that web developers can create. Once, developers were limited to only using Hypertext Markup Language and Cascading Style Sheets—HTML and CSS—in constructing sites. Now, however, these two elements are only considered the foundation or the “bones” of a website. The bulk of the programming work of a site or the “muscles” lies with the integration of Javascript. Developers fluent in Javascript can create amazing online content: interactive graphics, embedded videos, and reactive elements, just to name a few examples. With other design tools based in Javascript, the sky is truly the limit when it comes to website design.

Quite a few years ago Google announced the availability of annotations for websites that would target users in other languages as well as users that were physically in other countries. These invitations are representative of a conglomerate of quibbling pages that are aimed at users around the world. They were also implemented by using rel-alternate-hreflang linking elements in the HTML code of each page contained in the cluster. There is also support for specifying these hreflang annotations within the site map.

Off-site, or off-page, SEO refers to the techniques that are implemented to improve the ranking of a website among search engine results pages (SERPs) that do not directly affect the experience of the user in relation to the way that they experience your content. Many times, off-site SEO is associated with link building, but it is so much more than that. After you have worked on getting all of your website content into order and perfectly optimized, you will need to focus on things like building your website's credibility, increasing the important inbound links, and also building your own social media presence. Google will never reveal their specific algorithm for search ranking, but the search engine giant does give out masses of information regarding creating relevant content that will make for a good user experience.

On-page optimization takes up one quarter (25%) of all SEO elements. This guide will help you to understand the importance of all areas regarding on-page optimization and how they work together to make your website the best that it can be.

Deciding how a user will navigate through content is one of the most important decisions a digital publisher can make from a usability perspective. The type of navigation used on a website can have a huge effect on conversions and user engagement. There are currently two popular ways for this to handle this sort of navigation. When there is a certain number of items per page with many pages listed or “next” and “back” indication, this is called pagination. Or, you can make it so that more content will load as the page scrolls, known as infinite scrolling. Which will work best in regards to search engine optimization? Read on to find out.

Driving Internet traffic to your site can be a constant battle. Thousands and thousands of sites exist out in cyberspace, and in any given Google search, hundreds of sites will show up in search results as potentially relevant to your key word search. If you want to be successful and draw people to your site, you have to know the system. Users will only go through so many different pages of search results. At some point the user will feel that he or she has looked through as many relevant search results as needed to make a good choice. As a web developer, you want your page to be at the top or at least close to the top of that search result list. However, countless other sites want the same exact thing. The problem is the methods of achieving this goal have not always been on the up-and-up, and it is for these reasons programs, such as the Penguin Algorithm, were created.