At first glance, creating a sitemap might seem daunting. Do you have to write down every URL on your site by hand?

Well, of course you don’t; the whole sitemap process can be automated. To that end, many third-party sitemap generator tools exist for just that purpose.

For most of these tools, generating a sitemap is as simple as entering your home page URL and then pressing a button. The tool then crawls your website and automatically generates a sitemap file; this typically takes just a few minutes. Once the sitemap file is generated, you can then submit it to Google Sitemaps, as we’ll discuss in short order.

Some of these sitemap tools are web-based, some are software programs, and most are free. The most popular of these tools include the following:

In most instances, you should name your sitemaps file sitemaps.xml and place it in the uppermost (root) directory of your website—although you can name and locate it differently, if you like.

After you’ve created your sitemap, you have to let Google know about it. There are two ways to do this—the easy way and the hard way.

The hard way (which isn’t all that hard) is to reference your sitemap within your site’s robots.txt file, which should be located in the root directory of your website.

What you need to do is add the following line to your robots.txt file:

Naturally, you need to include the actual location of your sitemaps file. The preceding example works only if you have the file in your site’s root directory; if it’s in another directory, include that full path. Also, if you’ve named your sitemaps file something other than sitemaps.xml, use the actual name, instead.

The next time the GoogleBot spider crawls your site, it will read your robots.txt file, learn the location of your sitemaps file, and then read the information in that file. It will then crawl all the pages listed in the file, and submit information about each page to the search engine for indexing.

If all you’re interested in is Google reading your sitemap (fie on you, Yahoo!), then you can submit your sitemap directly to Google Sitemaps. This ensures that Google will know about your sitemap—and its contents.

To upload your sitemap to Google, follow these steps:

Probably the biggest impact you can have on your site’s PageRank is to increase the number of sites that link to the pages on your site. (These are called inbound links.) As you learned back in Chapter 1, “Inside Google,” the PageRank rating is based on a complex and proprietary algorithm, which is heavily weighted in favor of inbound links to your site. The more sites that link to your site—and the higher the PageRank of those links sited—the higher your site’s PageRank will be.

To increase your PageRank, then, you want to get more higher-quality sites to link back to your site. And it’s not enough for those sites to have a high PageRank; they should also have content that is relative to your site. For example, if you have a site about NASCAR racing, you’ll get more oomph with a link from another NASCAR-related site than you would with a link from a site about Barbie dolls. Relevance matters.

The GoogleBot crawler can find more content on a web page and more web pages on a website if that content and those pages are in a clear hierarchical organization.

Let’s look at page organization first. You want to think of each web page as a mini-outline. The most important information should be in major headings, with lesser information in subheadings beneath the major headings. One way to do this is via standard HTML heading tags, like this:

This approach is also appropriate for your entire site layout. Your home page should contain the most important information, with subsidiary pages branching out from that containing less important information—and even more subpages branching out from those. The most important info should be visible when a site is first accessed via the home page; additional info should be no more than a click or two away.

This hierarchical organization is easily seen when you create a sitemap for your users. (This is distinct from the sitemap you create for and submit to Google Sitemaps.) A visible sitemap, looking for all the world like a big outline, not only makes it easier for visitors to find information on your site, it also gives the GoogleBot crawler some very meaty information to process.

Just as important as a page’s layout is the page’s content. You want to make sure that each and every page on your site contains the keywords that users might use to search for your pages. If your site is all about drums, make sure your pages include words like drums, percussion, sticks, heads, drumset, cymbals, snare, and the like. Try to think through how you would search for this information, and work those keywords into your content.

Think about hierarchy and think about keywords, and then think about how these two concepts work together. That’s right, you want to place the most important keywords higher up on your page. The GoogleBot will only crawl so far, and you don’t want it to give up before key information is found. In addition, PageRank is partially determined by content; the more important the content looks to be on a page (as determined by placement on the page), the higher the PageRank will be.

Google also looks to highlighted text to determine what’s important on a page. It follows, then, that you should make an effort to format keywords on your page as bold or italic.

Here’s something you might not think about. At present, Google parses only text content; it can’t figure out what a picture or graphic is about, unless you describe it in the text. So, if you use graphic buttons or banners (instead of plain text) to convey important information, Google simply won’t see it. You need to put every piece of important information somewhere in the text of the page—even if it’s duplicated in a banner or graphic.

If you do use images on your site, make sure you use the <ALT> tag for each image, and assign meaningful keywords to the image via this tag. GoogleBot will read the <ALT> tag text; it can’t figure out what an image is without it.

Following on the previous tip, make sure that you link from one page to another on your site via text links—not via graphics or fancy JavaScript menus. Google will find and use the text links to crawl other pages on your site; if the links are non-text, GoogleBot might not be able to find the rest of your site.

When calculating PageRank, Google not only considers the visible content on a page; it also evaluates the content of key HTML tags—in particular, your site’s <META> tags. You want to make sure that you use <META> tags in your page’s code, and assign important keywords to each of those tags.

The <META> tag, which (along with the <TITLE> tag) is placed in the head of your HTML document, can be used to supply all sorts of information about your document. You can insert multiple <META> tags into the head of your document, and each tag can contain a number of different attributes. The two most important <META> attributes, when it comes to search index ranking, are DESCRIPTION and KEYWORDS. You use the first to provide a brief description of the page’s content; you use the second to list all the important keywords that might be used to search this page.

You use separate <META> tags to define different attributes, using the following format:

Replace attribute with the name of the particular attribute, and items with the keywords or description of that attribute.

For example, to include a description of your web page, you’d enter this line of code:

To add keywords that GoogleBot can index, enter this line of code:

Note that you separate each keyword by a comma, and that a “keyword” can actually be a multiple-word phrase. You can include up to 10 keywords with this attribute.

You can include all three of these <META> attributes in the head of your HTML document, each in separate lines of code, one after another, like this:

Your page’s title is important because it’s one of the first places that Google’s searchbot looks to determine the content of your page. GoogleBot figures, hopefully rightly so, that the title accurately reflects what the page is about; for example, if you have a page titled “The Dutch Apple Pie Page,” that the page is about Dutch apple pies. Unless you mistakenly or purposefully mistitle your page, the searchbot will skim off keywords and phrases from the title to use in its search engine index.

In addition, when your page appears on Google’s search results page, the title is the search engine uses as the listing name. The title is also what appears in the favorites list when a visitor adds your site as a favorite.

For all these reasons, you need to get your most important keywords and phrases into your page’s title—which you do via the HTML <TITLE> tag. In fact, <TITLE> tag is just as important as the <META> tag—which is why you shouldn’t fall into the trap of assigning only your site name to the tag. Instead, the <TITLE> tag should contain two to three important keywords, followed by the site name.

For example, if your stamp collecting site is called The Stamp Shop, you might use the following <TITLE> tag:

This is a tough one. Most cutting-edge web designers have switched from standard heading tags (<H1>, <H2>, and so on) to Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) <DIV> and <SPAN> codes. That’s unfortunate, as Google looks for the old-fashioned heading tags to determine the content (and thus the PageRank) of your site. If you want to optimize your ranking in the Google index, you’ll switch back to the <H1> and <H2> tags for your page headings—and make sure you use the content of those tags wisely.

GoogleBot crawls the Web with some frequency, looking for pages that have changed or updated content. If your site hasn’t changed in awhile, this can affect your PageRank. So you’ll want to make sure you change your content on a regular basis; in particular, changing the content of your heading tags can have a big impact on how “fresh” Google thinks your site is.

Contrary to the previous advice, Google actually has a problem tracking some frequently updated content—in particular, the type of dynamic content generated by blogs, news sites, and the like. Put simply, GoogleBot doesn’t crawl dynamic pages as well as it does static pages. (It has to do with how long it takes some dynamic pages to load; spiders only allocate a certain amount of time per page before they move on to the next site to index.)

There are two solutions to this problem. One is to use a content management system (CMS) that loads fast enough to appease the GoogleBot crawler. The second solution is to publish your dynamic content as an RSS feed. This second solution is probably the best one, as Google does a really good job digesting RSS feeds to populate its search index. When in doubt, make sure that you generate an RSS feed for all your dynamic content.

I’ve saved the best SEO tip to the last. If you want to increase your Google PageRank, increase the quality of your site’s content. It’s simple: The better your site is, content-wise, the higher it will rank.

That’s right, when it comes to search rank, content is king. Google’s goal is to figure out what your site is all about so it can better answer its users search queries. The higher quality and more relevant your site’s content to a particular search, the more likely it is that Google will rank your site higher in its results.

So forget all about keywords and <META> tags for the time being, and focus on what it is your site does and says. If your site is about quilting, work to make it the most content-rich site about quilting you can. Don’t skimp on the content; the more and better content you have, the better.

There are some things you can do to your site that Google absolutely, positively won’t like. And when Google doesn’t like something, your PageRank suffers—or, worst-case scenario, you don’t show up in the search index at all.

What are some of these ill-considered techniques? Here’s a short list:

The previous section talked about things you might accidentally do that can adversely affect your PageRank rating. There are also some practices that sneaky web designers deliberately do to increase their page rank; Google takes issue with these practices, and can ban you from their index if you’re caught.

To that end, here are some of the more nefarious outlawed optimization practices: