What’s an XML Sitemap?

Think of a sitemap as a guide for Google’s spiders to crawl over and navigate your site as quickly or as tricky as you make it. The easier you make it, the happier Google’s spiders will be.

This file in an XML format often has a list of every page, blog post, and other items (even images) seen on your page by Google and other search engines. It’s a way that the search engine can index your page and show it as a list. Have you ever searched for a website and saw the main page link, then a few sub-pages listed directly below that? That’s what a good sitemap does for a company.

In the past, WordPress used to use a robots.txt file, which often gets flagged by search engines for malicious content. By generating a sitemap, you can avoid this flag and also make sure that you have a crawlable website – meaning search engines can spider your page to ensure you’re always on the top results.

What Does a Sitemap Do for Business?

By deploying a well thought out sitemap, you could push your site over the hump and onto Google’s first page.

Having a good sitemap is extremely professional and can differentiate between a good ranking and the best. Also, it makes people searching for a service your company offers will see other things your company may offer. This could mean potential revenue increase and an improved sense of performance and client (customer) conversion. That alone is an excellent reason, but there is more to it.

If you have pages like member’s only pages, you can point out that you want to exclude those sections in the sitemap. That means that once a user is logged into a secure portal, their information isn’t going to be leaked or distributed or spidered into a search engine that people can search for. If you’re not a social media company, then this can help you protect vital information and still increase website traffic just by someone clicking your company’s page from their favorite search engine.

Do Sitemaps Improve SEO?

A sitemap will undoubtedly help improve your site’s SEO and web ranking. It also allows you to see if you have any broken links, negatively affecting your website’s SEO.

Having a good sitemap can improve your website’s ranking regarding search engine optimization and even social media optimization. No matter if you have it hosted with a primary provider or your local IT company (many offer website hosting packages as well that offer you just what you need and nothing more), you can still grow your online persona and web presence, thus improving your customer service and search engine rankings. As we mentioned, you can use a sitemap to include particular items that can boost sales.

Do I Have to Have a Sitemap?

The short answer is no, you do not need to have a sitemap, but you should because it will only help your company and SEO rank.

The real answer to this is no. You don’t have to have one. And WordPress used not to have one. But they ended up throwing it in there because this way, people don’t have to jump through hoops and rings of fire to create one and get their page indexed by search engines. There have been many plugins out there, from Yoast, and a few others that offer features like this – but you have to pay for them. For WordPress to include this feature for free will allow businesses to make faster and easier improvements to their SEO endeavors.

You Can Give Sneak Peaks of Products Before You Launch

Being able to offer a sneak peek into your YouTube video’s content will pique interest from potential customers.

Something that many people have done aside from making it rich and being viral on YouTube is that once the product has been made and patented (which is often the first step for their security), businesses can create promos for their new products and push them out to showcase them before they’re ever released. This kind of advertising isn’t uncommon, and with YouTube, they can do it themselves rather than worry about the media-controlling situations.

Not only that, but you can also use YouTube for creating special videos that you can squeeze promotional videos. Want to know something cooler? As long as you own the copyright to your YouTube videos, you can monetize them and make even more money!

Why Choose Video for Your Website?

Well, first off, who doesn’t love being able to upload something for free and share it with the world? Most people consume data by watching videos more than they do by reading. And it is free advertising for your website! People always want to see stories, and when they see the person or business talking about it, they feel a personal connection with you on more than a business level.

YouTube can Increase SEO.

YouTube videos go hand in hand with SEO and keyword optimization to help you rank your site higher.

Believe it or not, you can also use it to create a video for every single keyword that you want to use on your site. Google can use YouTube videos in search results. Even better, when people watch a video on your website, they’re doing something amazing that people don’t even realize affects page rankings – keeping people on your website. Google has algorithms, and they focus on the quality of content, a little about keywords, backlinks, and another important factor, which is how long people stay on your website.

People watching your video will stay on your website to watch your videos, especially if you have something enticing to offer them in terms of visuals. Believe it or not, you could probably use a viral YouTube video and keep people watching it just because. Simultaneously, having YouTube videos can improve people’s persona, which’s extremely important for your company.

YouTube Videos Can Be a Customer Support Tool

Most of your clients will search for YouTube videos before they reach out with a question. Why not beat them to the punch and make your own?

Many people want to know how to use products when they’re thinking about buying them. Did you know that if there is a product you sell, consumers are less likely to follow directions in a manual; they’re going to look it up on YouTube first? By having instructional videos, you can make people feel more like you care about how they feel and want to help them. By doing so, you’re giving exceptional customer care tactics and giving them a free tutorial so they can get the most out of your product.

How Does This Have Anything to do with Network Solutions?

Using YouTube videos could help customers with disabilities, or maybe they are in a tight spot financially.

Glad you asked! Believe it or not, there are many things mentioned that you can use YouTube videos for. For example, people often have blogs that they write about on their websites. Some people don’t have the luxury of reading these blogs, so that you can incorporate videos into your blogs as well. These are called vlogs.

So if you’re wanting to write about computer networking support and want to get your message out there even further, you can easily do so by incorporating a YouTube vlog showcasing what you’re talking about in your own words.

Integrating Voice Search

By integrating voice search, you’ll be optimizing your SEO in a way that many of your competitors are not.

Voice recognition is becoming a useful tool when it comes to keyword optimization, as well as the latest trend in mobile devices. Approximately half of all online searches are expected to be based on voice recognition. Therefore if your site doesn’t have it on their search, then you may be in for a surprise or have trouble closing the deal when it comes to buying your products or people trying to search your website (not just Google). You may want to consider adding some vocal recognition on your website to stay ahead of the game.

Don’t Count Keywords – Avoid Keyword Stuffing.

If your strategy is to stuff as many keywords into an article, it could hurt your SEO.

Ah, the wondrous world of keywords. This was a big debate in 2019, as many things have changed regarding this issue. A few years ago, keywords became somewhat as relevant as normal conversation. All of the major search engines have begun to incorporate the one primary rule: quality content is the king for SEO. Of course, keyword optimization has still been used a lot, and you may see websites that use keywords numerous times in their websites, busting out multiple keywords for their website in humongous lists. The truth is this; in 2020, it’s not going to matter how many keywords you have on a site. And concentration on this factor will become null and void.

Keyword Importance Moving Forward

Sure, you still need some keywords to get to the top of the charts, and they’ll help. But in 2020, they’re not going to matter as much. Many of the most successful millionaires, writers, bloggers, and even digital marketers aren’t even relying on keywords as much as they used to. Just a couple of keywords here and there, and write something that the reader wants to read.

The keywords that you choose are the guide to how customers will find your blog or site. So choose them wisely and make sure they are relevant.

This is where quality is going into play. When you have too many specific keywords and phrases, you’re going to get sloppy and cruddy content on your page full of terms that people may search for once in a while but are pretty irrelevant. With BERT’s evolution, Google’s new search algorithm that will be live soon, you don’t even need to use keywords as much as you need to have relevant content.

Simultaneously, many users are using long-tail keywords more than they are using short ones these days. This is also part of the whole voice search movement that is taking place, and people are saying things like “What is the best movie in the world in terms of earning the most money?” rather than “most successful movie.” See the difference there?

Mobile Must Come First

Today, everyone is always on their phones. That’s why making sure your site’s SEO is optimized for mobile is just as important as choosing the right keywords.

You need to know that if you have a website that doesn’t neatly optimize its SEO to mobile devices, you may be in trouble ranking in 2020. This is one reason why many people have been switching to WordPress so that you know (since most of the templates on WP have been known to be optimized for mobile devices). Google and many other search engines count content first, but they will list the optimized websites for mobile devices first. This is extremely important, and if your website is outdated, you’re going to have some hard times since most users will be on their mobile devices.

How do you fix it? Well, it may be time for a rebuild, and you better optimize your website’s SEO for mobile, and once that’s done, then you can work on the desktop layout.

Automation Will Help

Automation can help your business immensely, along with VoIP, telecommuting, and mixed reality.

From chatbots (you can see our guide on that), all the way to creating an excellent experience for your users, numerous things can help your website. To succeed, you can’t sit on the website or Facebook page for your business 24/7, answering everyone’s calls. Primarily if your small business has grown large enough to need something like a call center or where you have to use a quality VoIP service to get all of your phone calls answered well.

By having some programming integrated into your website, you can get the best solutions possible. You can even use quality programming to save precious marketing and analysis data to a localized cloud network for easy access to improve your business and website even more!

You may be surprised, but there are ways that you can greatly improve your web traffic and generate more revenue, more customers, and more unique visitors every day. We’ll show you how if you keep reading.

Perform Your Audit

First, to boost your web traffic, you’ll need to perform an SEO audit on your website.

If you have spare time on your hands, you’ll want to do a full website audit. This means that you’re going to check the analytics and see where your website is lacking. Usually, it’s just with the content itself, not having enough of the right content where it needs to be. Keywords are still important, but so are links as well. You can use websites like Ahrefs and Screaming Fog to see how your website fares with backlinks and SEO. You can also use websites like Pingdom’s Website Speed Test to ensure that you have good speed – nobody likes a slow loading website.

Improve or Redesign?

Believe it or not, your website design affects your web traffic. Outdated design, slow speeds, and poor user experience could negatively affect your web traffic.

When it comes to some companies, especially the local ones, you’ll notice that they have had the same website design since 2005. Nearly 15 years later, this can be an issue, not just for SEO purposes but also because it won’t keep people engaged or help them spread the word. Please give your website a refresh to make sure they load fast and that it is completely optimized.

Content is the Number One Issue

Content is undoubtedly king when it comes to driving web traffic to your site.

As we said before, having the right content on your page is better than having too much content. You’ll want to optimize your links to keywords, use keywords in your image alt tags, and most businesses have a blog these days. Be sure you stay on top of it, though, as regular content gets better results and gives you more backlinks, which we’ll get onto next.

Backlinks and Social Media

If your business isn’t utilizing social media to its advantage, you’re missing out on valuable web traffic.

More than half of the world is on Facebook today, and so you should be too. Create a business page and keep it updated with things like blog posts and more. If you want to advertise, please use Google Ads and Facebook Ads if you have the revenue for the expense, but it’s not even needed. Use social media, including Twitter, LinkedIn, and others, to create stunning backlinks and professional business profiles that can drive people to your site.

Don’t want to use a chatbot? Even Facebook has some excellent automated features that are free to help generate backlinks, web traffic and keep you in touch with clients and customers.

YouTube is No Longer Just for Creators

While numerous YouTube content creators post random videos about random things, you can use YouTube to your advantage. If you want to create videos that will only appear on your website and embed them, all you have to do is flag them as unlisted, and then you can still embed them on your website. This gives your website even a more professional and personable experience for your users.

Don’t Make Your Website Confusing.

If you want to increase your SEO, web traffic, and decrease bounce rate, you’ll want to make your site a bit less busy than LingsCars.com.

Some websites are tough to navigate, whether it be menus, header and footer links, and sometimes just the overall layout. Your web design, graphics, and links should all be easily ready for people to use so they can navigate your website quickly. Most importantly, since phone and mobile design prioritize website search results like Google, it doesn’t hurt that in your audit, you make sure your site is designed and optimized for phones. The downside to this is that you may need a designer (or hire one) if you can’t do it yourself, so you can ensure that all different types of phones can load your pages.

Here’s What You’ll Get

If you follow all of the above steps in this guide, you’ll notice that you’re going to be doing better on your page rankings and get more web traffic. Here’s a little secret – It’s a dog eat dog world out there. If you still lack under your competitors, go to their pages and see what they’re doing to improve their SEO so you can go one step above them.

Another thing you can do is get a VoIP service for your offices to put on your website. This protects a lot more professional and personal data so that you can list these rather than list personal or cell numbers. With the right services, you can have numerous features like unlimited calling and even call forwarding to those phones when choosing a good VoIP provider.