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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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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How The Google Cache Feature Saved Me A Lot Of Effort And Time

We all know how far reaching Google, we constantly use many of their services such as Gmail, Adsense, Adwords, Google Earth, Google Search and their just released Google Chrome web browser. What we don’t know is that Google offers so much more than just that, services that are really minor and often overlooked by many people. One such service or more accurately called as a feature of Google Search is it’s cache feature.

The cache feature displays a cached version of a website. Now, this feature alone can be useful in so many ways such as seeing how much a website has changed over a short period of time, loading webpages which are slow to load or are down and reading something the owner has just removed recently.

The Google Cache feature just saved me a lot of time and effort recently. I had deleted one of my posts which had taken quite an amount of time to write and I had no backups of it. I was quite devastated when it occurred to me that I shouldn’t have deleted it and now I had no way or time to rewrite it again.

Well, if it weren’t for me being a little enterprising and the usefulness of the Google Cache, that might have been the end of the story, a bad ending mind you. However, luckily I was quite creative and suddenly remembered about the Google Cache feature of Google Search. I typed in the URL of the post and was hoping that Google had managed to index the page (it was quite new) before I had deleted it. I needn’t have worried though, the posts had been indexed by Google and after just clicking the cached link and copying and pasting the content right back on my blog I had sorted out the dilemma I was previously in .

Learning point: Next time when you are in a fix, try to think creatively about how to solve the problem. And if you are blogger, now you know how to use Google Cache as a last resort to get back the content of your post .

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Wordpress 2.6.2 Has Just Been Released

Wordpress version 2.6.2 has just been released. According to Wordpress, version 2.6.2 protects Wordpress from a certain kind of hack that will reset your password among other minor bug fixes.

The hack is triggered whenever someone who registers to your website crafts his username in such a way that will be able to reset another user’s password to a random password. He then is able to take advantage of a weakness in the mt_rand() to be able to guess the randomly generated password. He then will be able to login as that user and can wreak havoc.

I recommend everyone who has open registrations enabled on their blog to uprade to Wordpress 2.6.2 straight away, while upgrading is not so urgent for those like me who have not enabled open registrations on their blog.

Now I just have to wait till after my exams when I have time to be able to properly upgrade my blog. Upgrading Wordpress is one of the things I fear the most, a lot of things have gone wrong whenever I tried to upgrade Wordpress in the past .

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