It is now widely known that having fresh, original, relevant and well written content on your site is vital when you are looking to gain the highest placing for search engine results. The days of badly written, spammy text are thankfully long gone, and all site visitors appreciate the fact that web pages now contain a much higher standard of text. However, alongside content, there are various other factors which will have an effect on your search engine optimisation campaign. This is particularly true when it comes to the technical aspects of a website.
One of the most important parts of your SEO campaign is making sure that the search engines can find you and index you correctly. This might seem like an obvious statement, but there have been many instances of superb websites failing to rank on search engines such as Google because this aspect was overlooked. As Google are by some distance the most widely used search engine service in the world today, let’s look at this in a bit more detail by using them as an example.
Google are constantly trawling the web, seeking out new and updated websites to index for search engine terms. On the basis of that, it’s easy to understand why some assume they don’t need to work on their site, as surely Google will discover it anyway. This isn’t quite true. It’s not as if Google has someone who looks at each page of every site to evaluate the content and determine which keyword search terms would be relevant. The process is entirely automated, and so to get the best from it you need to provide their system of indexing and ranking with what it needs. In this regard, an XML sitemap is essential. This is, broadly speaking, a “technical” version of the menu and sitemap you have for site visitors. The XML version tells Google what is on your site and what the content is on each page. A sitemap speeds up how fast Google indexes your site, and helps you get a higher ranking for relevant, easy to find content.
The XML sitemap is just one way to ensure the technical elements of the SEO work on your site are in place. Other factors include ensuring a robots.txt file exists so that Google knows which pages to look at and which to ignore, and making sure that your site is responsive and mobile friendly. If these factors are missing, search engines like Google are not going to rank the site as high as they should, no matter how great your content is.
In addition to having a team of skilled content creators, DLH Web Consultancy is home to web designers who know how to deliver the technical aspects of SEO work effectively. If your site isn’t performing on search engines as you expect, it’s likely that the technical requirements for indexing are either missing or incorrect. We are always happy to have a look at your site to see if this is the case, and discuss the best way to make your web presence perform as it should.