Google is always changing the way they rank sites – there are hundreds of updates to their algorithm every year.

But, despite all the changes, Google’s #1 recommendation has always been to have an up-to-date, valid XML Sitemap. If you aren’t creating a sitemap and maintain it on a regular basis, you could be missing out on rankings – not only for your main website pages, but also for the niche pages that can rank best to bring in long-tail traffic.

Don’t despair, there is an easy, elegant & cost effective solution!

As our existing clients with a Joomla website know we install by default a component called JSitemap Pro.

JSitemap Pro is a complete and powerful SEO suite. It will easily generate your sitemap generation and help with management, site indexing and analytics. JSitemap Pro helps improving your site’s ranking. You not only can manage all types of sitemap content, you don’t need to purchase an additional SEO extensions or hire an expensive SEO specialist to help you boost your website’s search engine indexing and ranking.

Here are just some of the features and functionalites, JSitemap Pro has to offer:

JSitemap Pro SEO Spider

JSitemap Pro ‘SEO Spider’ will help you identify any SEO issues your website might be experiencing at a glance and optimize your website for search engines. It will highlight the following SEO information and any search engine optimization problems:

• Crawled links/pages and their respective indexation directive
• HTTP status of each page (200, 500 status, and so on)
• The Title of each page
• The Description of each page and whether it is too short or not
• All header tags (H1 – H6) in every page
• The canonical URL for the page
• Any duplicate titles
• Any duplicate page description

Search Engine Meta Info

With the search engines Metainfo functionality, you can add/edit, by visiting one single page, the following:

• Page Title for the search engines and browsers: This title is shown in search engine results, in the browser and shared on socials. It should be about 50-60 characters long
• Page Description for search engines: This is the description normally shown in search engine results and shared on socials. It should be about 150-160 characters long
• Indexing directive: This is to easily help you provide indexing directives to the search engines instructing them to whether index the page and follow any links, not to index the page but follow any links, to index the page but not to follow any links, and last, not to index the page nor follow any links
• Image for social share: You can specify an image to instruct social networks to pick the correct image when sharing the page
• Save/Delete: Save meta info for this link, or delete current ones
• Published : Whether to publish the meta info you added/edited for the particular page or not by clicking on No/Yes
• Exclude: With this option, you can exclude any page and any links within the page from every XML sitemap

Google Indexing Tester

One of the biggest feature offered by JSitemap Pro is the Google indexing tester. It allows you to monitor how your website is being indexed by Google, which titles and descriptions have been indexed by Google and the relevancy order of each page.

JSitemap Pro also alows you to perform searches using a specific keywords, indexing language, language and the number of pages you want to see on the report:

• Navigate through pages of Google search engine result page (SERP)
• See the search result for a specific keyword
• See the average keyword SERP rank which will quickly let you know in which page your website is ranked for the given keyword
• See the Indexed Title of your competitor – This will allow you to ethically spy on your competition and see how they named their page (hint)
• See your website’s page, or your competition’s indexed link
• And the indexed page description.

Using ‘JSitemap Pro Google Indexer Tester’, you should be able to look at your competitor’s indexed page title and description to help you write a better title and description for your targeted keyword and page.

Integrated Pingo-O-Matic Web Service

Going to multiple search engines and informing them of new or updated pages is not necessary anymore when using JSitemap Pro integrated ‘Ping-O-Matic’ service.

Ping-O-Matic is a web service that will tell search engines about your new or updated content, in one single action.

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9 out of 10 searches begin online with a search engine …

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via organic search results from Google, Bing and the other search engines.

Generally, the higher a websites shows on a search engine page, the more visitors and traffic that website will receive.

Search engine optimization, in its simplest form, means thinking about the words or phrases that people might use to find your business and your website, and writing content that includes those words and phrases.

Feeding the right information from your website to the search engines

SEO has become big business and it is not always as successful as one would hope it to be. Fact is that a lot of time and money goes into feeding those search engines the right information in order to grab a higher ranking listing.

Generally, the search engines  look at titles, descriptions, meta tags, image descriptions, linking within the website, links from the outside that feed into your website indicating that your website is of interest to others. They engage comprehensive algorithms to make sure that the information is not just only set up to get a higher listing but the information on your website is actually relevant to what you are portraying.

Website owners often highly desire that their site appears in the top 10 in a search engine search. This is because users are not very likely to look over more than one search engine results page (also known as SERPs). In order to obtain good placement on search results in the various engines, webmasters must optimize their web pages. The process is called search engine optimization. Many variables come into play, such as the placement and density of desirable keywords, the hierarchy structure of web pages employed in a web site (i.e.. How many clicks from the home page are required to access a particular web page?), and the number of web pages that link to a given web page. The Google search engine also uses a concept called page rank.

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives: for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages important. Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.

Engaging a powerful helper

On every website we build we install a powerful sitemap extension that allows us the feed the search engines with the information they are looking for. It can be easily customised in the backend of your website. The extension is tied into the Google webmaster (console), Google analytics account of the website.

More about Sitemaps & SEO implementation on your website

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