"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.

Content marketing is now a large part of consumer engagement, as it attracts the attention of the perfect online audience for your brand. This means that a lot more companies are taking part in marketing their content, and it is getting more difficult to stand out among the sea of content that could seemingly drown you. To make it worse, almost every single business owner and marketer will find themselves stuck trying to create enough content, while getting their desired engagement and finding new ways to innovate old ideas. They are not alone and this is not an isolated incident. There is only so much content to be created until it needs a new spin. It doesn't matter if it is business-to-business marketers or business to consumer marketers, each comes with their own set of unique challenges. Even so, you may still benefit from these tips to figure out how to produce new and exciting content.

Performing a content audit for SEO on your website does not have to be the hard. Although it has not always been easy, it is vital that it gets done, so that your website and its content can receive the attention that is deserves. Whether or not you agree that content rules when it comes to website success, many others agree that it is one of the most important things to do correctly, so auditing your content is something that must be done. For those that are not familiar with a content audit, this is the process by which you will go through all of the content contained on your website and then determine its relevance and success. You will gather pieces of data about each individual piece of content and then you will analyze the data to conclude which content should be updated, what should be built on, promoted again, or what should even be deleted permanently.

It is highly likely that your business is facing a challenge with content. It could be a layout that hides important information, or a navigation arrangement that does not support customer services or purchases. Useful content may be buried too soon after it is posted before you are able to maximize its true potential. Or, less successful content does not become archived quick enough and ends up irrelevant to the audience but stays prominent on the website. These types of content problems are not only hard on you personally, but they become hard on your brand financially. Choosing to complete a content inventory is vital as a preliminary step to take control of the existing burden of current content, and will allow your brand to implement a content strategy that is influential.

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: