SEO Expert, Anthony Yap

Your site URL plays an important role in several areas:

While optimizing your website for top ten rankings with a well-chosen and well-defined URL is beneficial, be careful not to overdo it. Here’s something you definitely want to avoid: URLs that look like spam to the search engines. An example would be like this site www.debt-consolidation-loans-credit-card-debt-reduction-services.com. This URL has 64 characters including the .com! It’s rather obvious to anyone that they are trying to optimize their site for several keywords at one go – debt consolidation loans, credit card, and debt reduction services among others. Besides the keywords, the words are separated by dashes to help break up the words.

As a human seeing this URL, it looks very unnatural and so too will the search engines. If the webmaster isn’t careful, he could be hit with over-optimization penalties. It’s like raising a big red flag announcing to Google, “Look at me!”

Although dashes help break up keywords and may help distinguish the individual words in a URL, this is not necessary today. Search engines are getting smarter and can now distinguish the individual words in a URL even without the dashes. URLs without the dashes are also easier to remember because most people naturally type the words together and not add dashes in it as they type from memory.

URLs are just one part of the equation in ranking your website. At times, it may even be advantageous to create unique URLs from combining with another to establish a brand. This is especially true if you have thought up a catchy name that’s easily memorable. An example is Greenzap. This is a funds transfer service that functions much like Paypal. If you zoom over to that site, you’ll be able to get $25 webcash, courtesy of a referral from me. The name is catchy, memorable, unique and easily identifies the service.

Before rushing to reserve a domain name, take the time to brainstorm and research good keywords for your site and test various combinations of them manually at domain registrars like godaddy.com. Unless you’ve found one that is exceptional, put together a list of possibilities so you can make a final determination of which to pick. This may be long tedious work for a couple of hours or even days but well worth it if you come up with a domain that’s not already taken and helps to brand your business and your product/service.

Another consideration to take into account is the reservation of several good domains you discover. Even though ‘domain squatting’ is not likely to be very profitable, having multiple domains can help you dominate the search engine results pages. Imagine having 4, 5, or even 8 or ten of the top ten results on the first page of the search engine results pages (SERPs) listing your sites! You would be able to dominate your industry for those keywords online and garner a significant chunk of online business profits.

A domain name costs less than $10 a year but it can yield many search engine optimization benefits if used correctly.

Now that you know what Google Sitemaps are, how do you create one exactly?

Google sitemaps is based on 6 basic XML tags: <urlset>, <url>, <loc>, <lastmod>, <changefreq>, & <priority>.

Before those of you who are newbies or techno-phobes say “But, I’m not a programmer, I can’t write code!” “XML is too hard” and the like, bear with me and you’ll find this process rather simple.

Here’s a simple example of a XML sitemap for you:

< ?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.anthony-yap.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2005-06-04T18:30:17Z</lastmod>
<changefreq>always</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.anthony-yap.com/contact.php</loc>
<lastmod>2005-05-01T18:35:49Z</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.2</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

Now, let’s understand what each part means.

< ?xml version=”1.0? encoding=”UTF-8??>

Here you specify the file type as XML and the encoding type.

<urlset xmlns=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84?>
</urlset>

This part defines the XML schema that will be used for this file.

<url>
<loc>http://www.anthony-yap.com/</loc>
</url>

Now, you can specify the exact URL(s) by introducing a ‘url’ tag indicating the start of URLs that you want crawled. You include your specific URL with the ‘loc’ tag. In this case, this is my homepage. Like HTML, you close each open tag with ‘/’ and the name of tag when done.

<lastmod>2005-06-04T18:30:17Z</lastmod>

Here you indicate the last modification time according to the ISO 8601 format.

<changefreq>daily</changefreq>

Now, you define the frequency of change in this file. This gives Google an idea when it should revisit your page again.

<priority>0.2</priority>

Lastly, you establish the individual priority level for indexing of your pages with the ‘priority’ tag. This value will range from 0.0 to 1.o with the higher number being higher priority.

There you have it. An example of a sitemap you can use for your own site.

Now that you have your XML sitemap, how do you feed this information to Google?

First, load your completed XML file to your server. Remember where you uploaded it to.

Now go to Google Sitemap’s homepage and create a free account. Once, you have an account, log in.

Next, click on Add a Sitemap and enter the URL to your own sitemap. All done.

That’s all there is to it. While this code can be considerably more sophisticated, for many of you, it will be sufficient as a head start. Have fun creating and submitting your site pages!

Google bombing as defined by Answers.com: “A Google bomb or Google wash is an attempt to influence the ranking of a given site in results returned by the Google search engine. Due to the way that Google’s PageRank algorithm works, a website will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page all use consistent anchor text. Googlebomb is used both as a verb and a noun.”

In the largest ever case discovered of its kind, when a search is done on Google for the word “failure”, the result — George Bush’s Whitehouse Biography.

So it wasn’t just “miserable failure” that resulted in the number one rank for the current President much earlier. With 78.3 million results in Google for that word, it was no small feat to get this specific page ranked for that word.

All bloggers did was to place the URL for that site into the anchor text in their copy. The search engine spiders pick it up and used it to rank a page.

Following my discussion on anchor text you can begin to see that your site’s anchor text is one of the most important weighted factors to get ranked for your keywords.

Choose your anchor text wisely and well using research not guesswork.