SEO Company, SEO Nottingham

Google Sitemaps – What To Look Out For

When looking at your Webmaster Tools which features do you normally look at? The lazy SEO’er will just click through the links on the left hand side of the page, hoping that nothing stands out as odd or wrong.

If you’re new to Webmaster Tools or just find it a little daunting, one thing you can actively look for is the number of pages that have been indexed in comparison to the number your have submitted.

Look at the example above for RealWebSEO.com: we’ve submitted 150 URLs and 145 have been indexed by Google, so that’s 97% of the submitted URLs have been indexed. As a basic rule, we would say that if 80% or more of your submitted URLs are indexed then you’re doing a good job.  Using tags on a WordPress blog can bring up multiple pages of content that is pretty similar, a good XML sitemap plugin for WordPress could fix this issue.

How can you get more URLs indexed?

- First things first, have you submitted your sitemap? Some people will say this isn’t important but you don’t start a race with your shoe laces tying your shoes together do you? No, you have the very simple and basic systems in place from the very start. If you don’t have a sitemap then use an auto generator but do glance over it yourself just to check everything is as it should.

- Check your robots text. It almost doesn’t seem worth mentioning as it is so basic but it is one of those things that will stop indexing in its tracks!

- Is all your content unique? If you have pages with blocks of text that are similar across many pages then Google will not bother to index them all.

- The same goes for meta information, make sure that all pages meta titles, keywords and descriptions are different.

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