WELLNESSEO.com

Search Engine Marketing and its two arms, Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing, still remains a sort of a mystery to a lot of people who own websites today. SEM/SEO/SEA are processes that augment or improve the presence and the visibility of your website, using Search Engines. There are quite a lot of tools available in the market today that can help you use these processes.

Out of the three, Search Engine Optimization or SEO is one such process that needs to be applied carefully. Two Sub-divisions exist, where SEO is concerned – On Page Optimization and Off-Site Optimization. When People initially started using SEO, back linking was considered to be the most important part of SEO. Today too, many people do use more of Back Linking, than content optimization and other SEO processes. In-fact, today, many articles, e-books, and other research material also deeply delve in Back linking as a major SEO strategy. Back Links are nothing back one way anchor tags that refer to your website.

Many SEO “experts” and SEO professionals today, have become aware of the fact that just back linking is not the best or only way to optimize web pages and web sites. It just makes up for a small fraction of the entire SEO process; so much so that if a web master or SEO professional today is just back linking web sites to other websites, his websites are definitely not getting optimized.

On Page optimization, deals with SEO methods and processes that act on your own website and web pages. Off-Site Optimization deals with SEO methods and processes that use other websites and web-pages to optimize your website or web page. Some SEO strategies include meta tags optimization, alt tags optimization and html tags optimization, etc.

One of the new optimization techniques that is gaining ground pretty fast is creating optimized “Sitemaps” that are added to webmaster accounts within search engines and are also uploaded to your websites so that crawlers or bots could better index your web pages and would know which web pages to index. Sitemaps came into existence just over a couple of years back.

What are Sitemaps?

Sitemaps, previously used to be graphical representations of the structure of your websites – for enhancing the navigation of your websites. Today, there exists two different types of sitemaps. One which graphically represents the structure of your websites to your users, the other type of Sitemaps that are XML and or text files that are used to guide search engine bots and crawlers. Search engines like yahoo and Google place very high emphasis on sitemaps, especially when websites are dynamic or have dynamic content. These Sitemaps are usually spelled with a capital ‘S’. Sitemaps, thus reduce the importance of inter web page links. They also help in getting broken links or invisible links to get indexed. More over major search engines today provide free tools for creation of such Sitemaps.