Digital Compass

I was working in the field of search engine optimization from last three years, when I started optimizing sites there was not so many terms related with it. In my very first day at office my seniors taught me that doing optimization is getting back links for website. Back links with proper anchor text. At the end of the day I was satisfied that generating back links are only some thing which can optimize a website.

After completing three years in this field now I am well aware that only back links are not at all optimization of the websites. Now there are so many people who use to learn the techniques of search engine optimization from me. I guide them about both the ON page and OFF page factors of search engine optimization.

In ON page factor, there are some thing's which is related to your own website and in OFF page factor, there are some thing's which is related to the websites which are not yours. In ON page we use to do Meta Tag Optimization, proper content for the website, Alt tag optimization for the website, proper navigation for the website and much more activities through which we do changes in the websites. In OFF page factor we create back links for our website.

Sitemap is something which came in existence a few year's back. People thought it's a tool through which they can optimize their websites. In fact sitemap is an easy tool through which a site owner can inform search engines about the pages of their websites. Through sitemap people can create an index of the pages of their websites which are required for crawling by search engines. A sitemap can be created in XML format. This page will list the pages of the websites along with some Meta data for each of the URL's which is listed in sitemap. These data can contain Change frequency, Last modification Time, and the priority of the page. Due to all these data, search engines can crawl more intelligently.

Sitemap is useful just because it contains all the information regarding all the pages of the websites at a single page. Hence, search engines can gather all the information regarding the website from a single page and due to this they crawl each page of the websites regularly. Some of the people argue that a sitemap can not contain more than 500 pages of the websites. Some of the people contradict about this. But in Google guidelines it is clearly written that "Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100)." Hence, we can assume that a sitemap can not contain more than 500 links, but it's an assumption only. Hence we can say that sitemap is very much useful for website owners, and with the help of only this tool they can optimize their websites and do the initial phase of search engine optimization.