If your website has an XML sitemap, Changefreq and Priority are two important tags for supplying data to the search engines. They affect when and how often search engine “spiders” (also called “robots” or “crawlers”) visit your site’s individual pages, which has various implications. Although using the Changefreq and Priority XML sitemap tags is voluntary, they remain important for several reasons…

According to Google.com, the Changefreq XML tag may be set to one of seven frequencies: “never”, “yearly”, “monthly”, “weekly”, “daily”, “hourly”, or “always”. This tells the search engines approximately how often each page is updated. An update refers to actual changes to the HTML code or text of the page, not updated Flash content or modified images. Changefreq examples…

NEVER: Old news stories, press releases, etc.
YEARLY: Contact, “About Us”, login, registration pages.
MONTHLY: FAQs, instructions, occasionally updated articles.
WEEKLY: Product info pages, website directories.
DAILY: Blog entry index, classifieds, small message board.
HOURLY: Major news site, weather information, forum.
ALWAYS: Stock market data, social bookmarking categories.

The Priority XML sitemap tag is useful, although not quite as important. It is set to a number ranging from zero to one; if no number is assigned, a page’s priority is 0.5. A high priority page may be indexed more often and/or appear above other pages from the same site in search results. Here are some examples of different types of pages and how their Priority sitemap XML tag value might be set, depending upon how important they are…

0.8-1.0: Homepage, subdomains, product info, major features.
0.4-0.7: Articles and blog entries, category pages, FAQs.
0.0-0.3: Outdated news, info that has become irrelevant.

How strictly they want to follow the Priority and Changefreq sitemap specifications is up to the search engines; these XML tags are considered preferences, not orders. This doesn’t mean search engines don’t consider Priority and Changefreq important, just that they won’t put sitemap instructions before their own interests (like making sure a site hasn’t changed its subject or become pornographic).

But why is it important when or how frequently search engine “spiders” index your pages? When a “spider” visits a web page, it records information about the page’s content, title, META tags, links, and other characteristics. This ensures that search results reflect its latest content and take into account any recent improvements (such as new META tags or repaired links).

However, it is unnecessary for “spiders” to regularly scan pages that are seldom or never updated. Spider indexing consumes bandwidth (which can increase the cost of operating your website), and may briefly slow access to your site if it is run on a low-capacity server. Thus it is important to set the Changefreq sitemap tag to accurately reflect how often individual pages are updated.

Here are a couple SEO tips for your website when creating PDF documents.

1. Optimize The PDF File Name. When you create the pdfs, be sure to include your SEO targeted keywords in the file name.  Make sure that Google can identify what the PDF is about.  Don’t overdo it, but try to work in a few keywords into the file name like target-keyword.pdf

2. Complete Document Properties. Most PDFs are indexed without specified document properties, the most important of which is the Title. This document property is the equivalent of the html title tag.  If you don’t complete the Title property, the search engine is going to creat a title from the PDF’s content, and it may not be optimized for your targeted SEO keywords.  There are other PDF meta data properties that can be completed, the only other one of importance is the Subject property which is the equivalent of a meta description for .html pages.

3. Optimize your text in the PDF. For your PDF’s optmize the copy just like you would web page copy.  Don’t overdo it, but use target keywords in the first hundred words.  Try to use some variations to support long-tail while focusing on a main keyword for optimization.

4. Build links into PDFs. Include links in your PDFs, and pay attention to the anchor text used as Search engines recognize these links. In addition to including links in PDFs for search-related purposes, there’s also a good business reason as PDFs are often passed along to others via email.

For B2B websites with PDFs and White Papers, this optimization of PDFs can be incredibly important for your overall SEO strategy.  Qualified B2B visitors can be hard to find, make sure you give yourself every opportunity by leveraging your PDFs for top rankings.

We decided it was time to revisit the topic of Google announcement of its’ improved indexing of Flash and get an update.  Basically, I came across 4 case studies on Google’s indexing of Flash showing that:

1. Since the introduction of support for SWFObject in July, Google hasn’t associated text content in Flash with the correct parent URL or as a single entity.
2. Flash files can accrue PageRank independent of their own parent URLs.
3. Google doesn’t index URLs containing #anchors (fragment identifiers) in Flash per W3C Guidelines.
4. Currently, Google doesn’t seem to support translations of text content in Flash.

These case studies continue to show that SEO for Flash can be achieved but only if done properly and then it will have limited value when compared to a site without Flash.  SEO can be done for Flash, but it is not optimal.  The Adobe announcement has not changed the recommendations for the immediate future because:

• Google can see text and links inside the Flash file which is good but it will not split them up a Flash file into multiple pages and index them separately. That means that your Flash file will be the equivalent of one, massive HTML page, unless you break it up into multiple HTML landing pages.  Remember that this can’t use the #anchor because Google will not treat that as a separate URL.
• Google will not run all types of Javascript and this makes it uncertain in the fact that Googlebot will index a Flash file that is embedded using the SWFObject script.
• If you have content dynamically loading into your Flash movies from an 3rd party XML file, this content may not be indexed by Google.

Until this is settled, one of the best alternatives is to make  an HTML alternative that is not only helpful to the search engines, it’s also great for people without the Flash plugin and for disabled site visitors.

Sources for Blog Post:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html

http://www.beussery.com/blog/index.php/2008/10/google-flash-seo/

http://www.yourseoplan.com/seo-for-flash.html

If you look at the top of your browser window, above the address bar and menus, that’s where you will find the page title. It is specified to search engines by a title element, which is the TITLE tag.

The reason so much importance is placed on the page title is that it helps search engines understand what a web page is all about, thereby increasing the relevance of search results. However, recently there has been some question as to whether longer page titles rank better or not. Here are some thoughts on that topic:

Many experts wonder if there is a downside to having title tags that match a popular search query exactly. The reasoning behind this train of thought is that these types of title tags will be seen as an advertising attempt to trick the user into clicking rather than true content to help searchers.

So, this may be one reason a longer page title could rank better than one that includes only the searched term or phrase.  We have found that a 5-6 phrases followed by the company seems to work best.  Here is one example of a page title we have done:

Another thought is that the end user experience is better with a longer page title. This would be because it’s generally easier to understand a page’s content with a longer title.

If you do decide to go with a longer title, though you don’t want to make it overly long. Keep in mind that Google only displays the first 63 characters in search results so the searcher won’t see more than that.

While Yahoo and MSN show more characters it’s best to go with a title that can be displayed fully on all 3 major search engines. You also only want to use your best, or most important, keywords. Typically pages rank better when there is more than one keyword in the tag.

So, it seems as though the answer may be that medium page titles work best. You don’t want a title that seems spammy to the search engines or the end user on one hand. But, on the other hand you don’t want a title that will be cut off so that your topic isn’t clearly shown to the search engines and end users.

We see many sites that go over-board and place 100 – 125 characters in the title tag.   While not confirmed, Google is always looking for ’signs’ of a spammy site and a long, keyword rich TITLE.   Our recommendation is to use the full 63 characters for the page TITLE without going over and place your most important keywords first.   In addition, if you are going to put your company or website name into the title, we recommend doing that at the end of the page title.

Google Webmaster Tools now makes the process of tracking down the causes of “Not found” errors a piece of cake. Before, you could only watch the number of 404’s increase and decrease in Google Webmaster Tools, now you can actually use GWT to take action and turn these external links into new inbound links.  Here is a quick overview of where to look for this information in GWT:

Watch Video Here

You can get more information at Google Webmaster Blog Post.   We are glad to see the constant improvements by Google on the webmaster tools and we avidly monitor and manage the information in the Google Webmaster Tool interface.

If you want to take advantage of this new feature to not only reduce 404’s but increase links, here is a sample email you could send to those sites with 404 links to your site to increase both your link count and your anchor text relevance:

(Person),

This is (clients name) from (client) and we noticed through our Google Webmaster Tools that you have a link to our site. First off, I would like to say thank you for linking to (client website) as we believe it is a valuable resources for your website visitors. However, we did find that there is an issue with the link that is pointing to our site. The issue is that the page you linking to no longer exists on our site and we would really appreciate it if you could update this link to an active page. To help you find the page that is linking to our site we have included a screen shot below that contains this information. Right below this information is the link to the new page we would like you to point this link to with the anchor text. We would like you to replace the broken link with this new information.

Broken Link:
(Put bad link here)

New Link:
(Put new link here with optional description if page allows it)

Please let me know if you have any questions and I can help you work through those.

Thank you ,
(Clients Name)