The Importance Of The Priority Tag In Google Sitemaps

I’m sure most of you all have heard and even use sitemaps on your sites right? Well, I just want to take the time here to stress how important the priority tag in it is to search engines, particularly Google. The importance of correctly setting the priority tag in your sitemap.

At first I didn’t really care much about the priority tag in my sitemap, letting the the Google sitemap generator plugin in Wordpress do automatic priority calculation for my site when I upgraded it. So the plugin did it’s job, calculating the priority values for pages and posts in my site – my posts got assigned a priority value of about 3 to 4 while tags and categories got assigned a value of 6 to 8. At that time I didn’t understand what the priority tag in the Google sitemap meant so I left it be, trusting the plugins automatic calculations and ignoring the voice in my head telling me that the priority of URL’s in my sitemap  were actually all manually set at 1 before.

A few days later I noticed there was an extremely sharp drop in traffic from search engines. Keywords which I used to rank number 1 in were no longer bringing in traffic. I found this really strange as the keyword I was ranking number 1 in was quite a popular keyword and had been bringing in traffic quite consistently. I did a quick search on Google and found out that the post that used to rank number 1 in it was no longer ranked number 1. I added the word “drett” after the keyword and searched on Google again only to find that only a category of my site was indexed. The previous posts was nowhere to be found within the Google search index.

To confirm what I thought had happened, I did a quick search on Google for the pages of my site and this was what I got:

Notice that no posts was listed, only tags, categories and archives.

The first few pages of the result were all filled with tags, categories and my archives, the posts were at the last few pages. I immediately connected the situation with something to do with the priority tag settings in my sitemap and went and set the priority in my sitemap to be all the same for all posts, category, tag and pages.

After 2 days (today), I found that my previous keywords were once again bringing in traffic. I did another search on Google for the pages and posts indexed in my site to see whether there was any difference.

Notice that some of my posts are now included on the frontpage.

After looking at the results, I found that more of my posts were located on the frontpage, which is a good thing. There were still a few categories that ranked higher than my posts which I think that I will be able to fix once I set the priority of the categories lower in my sitemap. If you are wondering why I want my posts to rank higher than all my categories and tags, it’s because my posts contain more content and keywords thus ranking higher in search engines than my categories and pages.

I did a little bit more research on the priority tag on Google and found out that the priority of the URL is relative to other URL’s in your site and that the priority you assign to a URL has no direct influence on the position of your URL on the Google search engine. Although the priority has no direct influence on the position of the URL in the Google search engine, I found out that the priority tag influences the likelihood that your more important pages are indexed in the search engines results. When I my posts had a lower priority than my categories and tags, the Google search engine decided to include my categories and tags into it’s search results instead of my posts. This didn’t directly affect the position of URL’s in the search engine, however after running my categories and tags through whatever Google uses to rank pages, my categories could not rank as high as my posts thus appearing in the search engine’s index but not has high as my posts. This then directly affected the position of my URL’s in the Google search engine.

I’m still experimenting a bit with how the sitemap influences the inclusion of posts and pages of my site in Google’s search results, however I feel that it is safe to manually set all URL’s to a priority of 1 in the sitemap.

So, just to remind you all again, please do check the priority settings of the URL’s in your sitemap, as they might be limiting the amount of traffic you get from search engines .

Note: I do think that the priority tag has the same influence on all search engines but maybe I didn’t feel the affects of it as the other search engines might not have detected the change in priority of the URL’s in my sitemap.

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Get your Website Designed by Experts

Are you planning to get a website of your own to get your business that online advantage?

Although there are very many options available, you will need to consider certain basic stuffs before getting started on your own website.

One most important feature that you will need to spend a considerable amount of time is web design. You should either consider hiring an expert in web design or can try to buy those readymade websites which can be easily brought online along with all the scripts and details and just uploaded on to your hosting company’s server to bring your website live. All you need to add is the written content and other details and you will be ready with your brand new website without much strain.

Before hiring a web design company or freelancer you should always ask to show their portfolio and browse them to decide whether they are indeed capable of designing high quality websites or not. After requesting for portfolios, some web 2.0 design companies even give you a free quote if you can give the details of your web design needs along with the budget and you will be getting the quote within two to three days.

You can bank on such services even for redesigning your existing website or can even get them to add shopping cart to your existing website for a nominal charge. And thus you will be ready in no time to start your online business venture.

You can also buy some readymade websites which actually are pre-designed and you can choose from them the ideal website for your need. You will be getting the domain name, full script, template design as well as PSD file.

If you are looking for web 2.0 design for your website then the readymade web 2.0 templates are the best choice, which you can buy and this also comes with the plug and play option and hence you can get it loaded easily onto your website and add the necessary written content and script to it, it’s as easy as that. The benefit of these templates is that you don’t have to tamper your website for better designs. All you need to do is to give the specifications of yours, like color and designing options, sizes, etc and you will be getting the unique template of your choice in no time. Or as always can browse through the collection of premium templates available from them and buy the one which you feel would be best suited for your business.

Another important but often ignored option when it comes to web designing is the shopping cart which many tend to overlook when building up the web design or online business model. You can get the online shopping cart for your business or ecommerce website easily by way of such cheap services where you, not only get great designs but also excellent after sales service which sometimes would be exceptional till you are completely satisfied.

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Wordpress 2.7 - My Thoughts

Wordpress 2.7 - Coltrane, which was named after the John Coltrane the great American jazz has just been released a few days ago. I usually hate Wordpress updates and upgrades as this usually means much more work for me to do. If the internet was fast and everything I won’t mind updating Wordpress often but the internet speeds in Singapore, or more specifically my school are extremely slow, thus wasting lots of my time whenever I FTP files up to Drett.com - sometimes going up to an hour just to transfer all my files up.

Wordpress version 2.7 however changes everything.

One of the most attractive feature that is compelling me to upgrade to Wordpress version 2.7 is that it has an automatic upgrade feature built in . I know before this there were plugins that could do the job of updating Wordpress in 1 click, but I however encountered many problems with such solutions and it really is such a relieve to see this capability built into Wordpress 2.7.

Wordpress 2.7 also has a newly designed administrative area which somehow is able to present more information in a more organized way. You might think that this interface is a bit weird compared to the older interface, but trust me, the interface will grow on you and you will eventually love it.

The newly designed administrative area in Wordpress 2.7.

These 2 features are the biggest things that to me makes Wordpress 2.7 the greatest and best versions of Wordpress to date .

Anyway, these are my thoughts about Wordpress 2.7 in a nutshell:

1. Wordpress 2.7 has an interface that will need some getting used to, but in the long run will benefit all Wordpress users.
2. Wordpress 2.7 will make it much easier whenever users upgrade now, encouraging a larger percentage of users to use the latest version of Wordpress.
3. Wordpress 2.7 has many more features that was previously brought in by plugins built into Wordpress itself now, which means users need not rely too much on plugins and thus minimize the conflict of plugins or other bugs.
4. The comment threading and comment paging capability will certainly please users that had gripes with Wordpress’s rather simple commenting capability and for those SEO guys who like to have less than 100 url’s within a page.

If you want to find out the complete list of new features found in Wordpress 2.7, you can check it out here.

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Make Money Online By Using Speak To Me

Recently I was introduced to a new way to monetize your website and make money online by using this service called SpeakToMe. SpeakToMe is a unique way of earning money online where clients or visitors pay to speak to you via a widget that can be embedded on your site. Your role is as an expert who advises customers or visitors on certain things they need help with and to interact with them in a personal level while customers pay by the minute for the opportunity to be able to talk with you.

One of the best things about SpeakToMe is that all experts (people who are members of SpeakToMe) get 80% of all revenue made by themselves. Yes, 80%. Tell me what other advertising network or money making programs online that pays you that high a percentage rate of your earnings. If you compare the percentage revenue which SpeakToMe takes away from your earnings, which is 20%, with another program that you can use to monetize your site such as Backlinks, which takes 50%, I’m pretty sure you would find SpeakToMe an interesting alternative. After all, who wants to do all the work of attracting customers and then have other people take away such a huge revenue percentage. If you are a new webmaster who wants to join SpeakToMe but has no capital to start with, do not despair as SpeakToMe has no startup costs.

Payment is made via check which gets mailed to you at the beginning of every new month. The payment is taken as your net earnings five days before the payout.

And now the best part of all. Ted Murphy which is the president of SpeakToMe has generously offered a guaranted $50 CPM for all those who email him at ted@speak-tome.com. You must email him to be accepted into the guarantee program, so please do not forget to email him. He will pay $25 upon signing up and another $25 for trying out the product. Guys, this to me is the most insane offer ever, you simply have to try this out. The service is good and there is even a guarantee $50 CPM, which means you have absolutely nothing to lose at all.

Don’t wait, try out this new method to monetize your website now.

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Wordpress Version 2.6.3 Has Been Released A Few Short Days Ago

A few days ago Wordpress was upgraded to the newest version yet – version 2.6.3. The reason for this update is because of a very minor vulnerability in the Snoopy library which Worpdress uses to fetch the feeds shown in the Dashboard of the Wordpress admin page.

The people over at Wordpress were quite thoughtful to give us 2 ways to upgrade Wordpress, one involves the traditional method of downloading the whole of the new Wordpress, while the other one just requires us to copy over 2 files to the old Wordpress 2.6.2 installation. Don’t you agree it’s much easier to do?

To find out more about the Wordpress version 2.6.3, check out this post, it’s a pretty short post though, just like this is .

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