Internet Business Consulting Services Corporation
Posts tagged google
Determine the best way to automate Sitemaps
Nov 16th
In simple terms, a sitemap (or site map) is a list of all the pages in your website. Sitemaps provide two benefits: easier navigation (for visitors of your site) and better visibility by search engines.
With the rise of modern SEO techniques the importance of the sitemap has been growing. Sitemaps are the best way to inform search engines about changes on your website.
As a development company, we always apply current SEO techniques on our customer’s websites to ensure that they get top ranking on search engines. Not only on Google, but Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com etc. as well.
Including sitemaps is one of the important tasks we perform when developing sites for our clients. And this is done either manually or dynamically according to the customer needs.
Typically a good site with lots of content changes regularly. In this case it is expensive and tedious to continually update the site map. For this reason, we feel that in some cases it is important to be able to auto generate a sitemap.
We evaluated some sitemap auto generating tools and following are some of the solutions we like:
- Google XML Sitemaps [ http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/ ]
- It is a plugin for Wordpress sites, which automatically updates the sitemap and notifies all major search engines every time you create a new post/content.
- Addme.com [ http://www.addme.com/ror-sitemap-generator.htm ].
- An online tool dedicated for sites developed using Ruby on Rails (ROR)
- Google Site Map Generator [ http://www.neuroticweb.com/recursos/sitemap/ ]
- Another simple online tool to generate site maps.
- PHPClasses.org [ http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/2612.html ]
- A class library which can be integrated with PHP sites.
It is obvious that selecting a sitemap generating mechanism is depending on several facts such as the nature of the site, sever side technology used etc. So making the correct decision is up to your experience in SEO and web development team.
Contact us if you would like help generating a sitemap for your site, have general web marketing, seo, or web design questions…
RDFa vs microformats for Google Rich Snippets
Nov 16th
We are in the process of implementing Google Rich Snippets into a customers web site. Specifically to provide ratings to travel vendors and travel destinations, which will appear in search results on Google as google snippets. These will be delivered in Cake PHP. Also we are considering using it for some product ratings for e-commerce sites delivered in Ruby on Rails. We may even consider adding it to WordPress sites as a way of rating the content described on the page.
Of course the immediate concern was which technology to use microformats or RDFa? Not that it should be a big concern but we have to support whichever technology we implement.
Searching microformats vs RDFa on, brought up a ton of articles, and in depth debates on the subject.
Understandably so, since microformats appear to be more adopted, and the other is developed by W3C.
I think Googles approach is a good one, they support both of them so we can use whichever standard we prefer.
As a development company we inherit a lot of work started by other development companies, so we will also support both. If we are creating or adding them from scratch to a site however, we will choose RDFa.
Initially I thought the opposite because microformats seemed more intuitive and easier to implement. After more research however, it seemed that RDFa would win out in the long run, and be more flexible. No one can know for sure though and I guess the best solution for everyone would be for them to just merge as a standard.
For more detail on the subject Evan Prodomou has a good write up RDFa_vs_microformats