As we approach the 25th anniversary of the ADA (American Disabilities Act), DYNO Mapper, an 1871 startup is successfully helping organizations locate, monitor, and fix accessibility and usability issues with their public facing websites.

DECEMBER 7, 2015, CHICAGO. In 1998, the United States Congress amended the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 to strengthen provisions that protect online access to information provided by the Federal government to individuals with disabilities. The law covers every type of electronic and information technology and is not limited to assistive technologies used by people with disabilities. It applies to all Federal agencies when they develop, procure, maintain, or use such technology. The Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility Standards were released on December 21, 2000 and the initial deadline for 508 compliance was June 21, 2001.

In previous articles we’ve talked about content marketing and auditing tools, DYNO Mapper’s Google analytics integration features and how sitemap tools can make your life much easier. We are going to take things a bit further in this article and talk about how analytics and content audits go hand in hand. Most people don’t realize that they can use analytics for content auditing purposes, but by utilizing your analytics data you will have the ability to rise to the top with fantastic content for search engines and visitors.

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 when it comes to the absolute success of your website. In many ways, a sitemap is a map to your success, a list of pages that can take many forms including an HTML listing of page names, a list of all of the page URL’s, machine-readable XML and so on.

Now, since this article is all about how you can build the ultimate XML sitemap for your website I want to first briefly discuss exactly what an XML is. If you know anything about sitemaps you’re probably aware that two of the most common are HTML and XML. There’s a big difference between the two, however, and it’s recommended for each website to have both types of sitemaps because HTML sitemaps are designed for website visitors whereas XML sitemaps are intended for search engines and spiders.

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.