How important is structuring site/sitemap for SEO

[SummumBonum000]

This is what my sitemap currently looks like.

I am using adobe Muse to create my webpages, each time I upload my site this page goes back intoto alphabetical order. How important is it for me to structure my site? My website has 4 langues under 4 different subdomains all linking from my intro page www.highestgoodclothing.com. What have other people done to solve this problem? Thanks for the help

[Alex_Pavelescu]

Hi,

It doesn’t matter how the items in the sitemap are listed, what’s important is their priority. You can always check the <priority> tag in the sitemap document (www.highestgoodclothing.com/sitemap.xml), and if the values correspond with the page relevance then there will be no issues. Also, please note that everytime you publish from Muse, the configuration and content already present on BC is overwritten, muse does not sync as Dreamweaver .

[Liam Dilley]

Hi Alex, that not exactly true, this sitemap and the sitemap.xml are different.

The ordering and sub structure of this sitemap is important for things like breadcrumbs.

[Alex_Pavelescu]

Sorry I didn't realize I will be leaving space for missinterpretation. Indeed, BCs sitemap (the module) ordering is relevant within the system itself, see breadcrumbs usage. And again, the order of the sitemap will be regenerated on each Publish action from Muse.

[SummumBonum000]

Thank you for the responses. Is there a way to change the priority manually? I am not seeing any of my blog posts on the search engines, and I see that they have the lowest priority. Also I make changes in Muse daily, then publish once finished. Is this constant change in my site going to affect SEO negatively?

[Liam Dilley]

How Muse publishes your site will have a negative effect on your SEO. Until you stop using Muse this will not change.

Your key main page - http://www.highestgoodclothing.com/ Your first page is a landing page.

Void of a heading 1, content, and has frames. This will obliterate most of your SEO from the get go.

(side note: Google does not read keywords meta)

The Blog is not well structured so some SEO issues there and I can see a key problem, Again down to using muse.

Your editing is creating multiple different urls and removing them, Each blog post is rather short, the detail view is no different from the infromation in the list view, so the content is not very dense and rich with keywords so they wont do that well SEO wise.

Google shows this for your facebook voip:

http://www.highestgoodclothing.com/_blog/Highest_Good_Blog/post/Facebook_is_now_testing_free_voice_c...
And your current is :http://www.highestgoodclothing.com/_blog/Highest_Good_Clothing_Blog/post/Facebook_is_now_testing_fre...

I can see a few other cases of this on the blog and no 301 redirects set up, so this as well will be all but zero'ing out your SEO on that front too.

Another issue is how you set up a us. subdomain which is not needed creating a url for a number of your pages which is not needed since - http://www.highestgoodclothing.com/will function. The menu structure is not well formed.

IF you click the blog link you go to: http://www.highestgoodclothing.com/_blog/Highest_Good_Clothing_Blog

Then click home you are not under .us so google will see two versions of everything with the same content.

This will not negativly effect your SEO but it is not doing you any good and google will choose a version to rank which may not be the want.

And of course time.

New sites take time to rank in google effectivily. Proper natural ranking really only shows at the very very earliest 3/6 months of a new site done well.

Unfortunatly there are a number of SEO issues with your site which will effect its ranking rather then an actual issue of the sitemap.

[SummumBonum000]

I appreciate the detailed report and I am going to start working on getting the site ready for search engines. I plan on moving to Dreamweaver because I would like to use the fluid layouts with my site. Thanks!

[SummumBonum000]

Would you happen to know if there is a way to differentiate what is on the

blog list page from what is on the blog detail page?

[Liam Dilley]

http://kb.worldsecuresystems.com/134/bc_1342.html#main_Blogs

{tag_blogpostbodypreview,Text}

Display a preview of the first paragraph of your blog post. Replace "Text" with the relevant words to link to see the entire post.

Does the first paragraph from your detail view. Add more content to your detail view. Also forget to mention your content is not in p tags. You wont be thanked by search engines for that either.