Webinar Recap: SEO Basics - Closing the Loop from Design to Build to Marketing

Oct. 28, 2010

Under: SEO

Closed loop SEO Today's recap post from our webinar, "SEO Basics - Closing the Loop from Design to Build to Marketing" will cover the questions we didn't have time to answer during the course of the presentation.

If you were unable to attend our presentation today, as always, you can view the webinar on-demand here.

Can you explain the difference between an HTML and a XML sitemap?

An HTML sitemap is a list of all the hyperlinks for different sections and pages of your website and is used to help your visitors navigate your website and find information more easily.

XML sitemap lists the URLs for your website in a special format which is designed to be read by search engines rather than humans. Submitting a XML sitemap to different search engines helps your website's indexing by making it quicker and more efficient and can help increase your website's visibility in search engines.

Our CMS automatically generates dynamic URLs for our webpages. Are these URLs optimized for search engines?

This depends on the way in which the URLs are generated. If they are automatically generated using the page's keywords then yes, they are optimized, if they are dynamically generated using miscellaneous numbers then they aren't.

Is there a way to automate the link building process?

The best way to "automate" your link building is to create content that people want to link to. Now that answer may seem oversimplified, but that's really the best way to receive quality inbound links for your website. This isn't a quick process and it takes a lot of time an effort, but consistently updating your website with fresh, relevant content that appeals to you audience will encourage linking all on its own.

Can you explain what "long tail" search is?

The term long tail was first used by Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, who originally used it as a way to describe how people search for products on big ecommerce websites. This theory was that popular items on these websites (the head) get a high volume of traffic while the niche products (the tail ) get low volume.

Anderson said that as websites develop more products (and by association, grow their long tail) the proportion of business from the many small, niche markets that don’t individually sell well will help rival that popular retail channels.

We hope you all enjoyed today's webinar. You can view the webinar in our resource section and you can register for our next webinar, "9 Social Media Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them," here.