Once upon a time, if you made your site high in Google rankings, you had it made. Times change. Google now has an estimated 35 to 40% of the search engine market, and Yahoo & MSN Search have about 50% market share. Getting high in search engines takes a little more study.
First, the good new is that Google sitemap is now the standard used by everyone. An organization called Sitemap.org has a standard for XML files that are becoming what all search engines use. No longer do you need the HTML, txt, and XML files to have sitemaps read by various search engines.
Bad news, Google puts a lot more weight in Linking than the other two. Yahoo and MSN look more at your page for keyword quality, and density thru the site. Yes, they look at the links, but they don't assign the same importance that Google seems too. Still, good practice is good for all search engines.
Keyword density. Make sure your keywords are relevant to your site, and used in your text. Don't stuff, make full sentences. One SEO expert claims that Google will use the same kind of sentence structure that MS Word will OK. So if you use word, validate your spelling and sentence structure with it. Density can be 2-4% of your overall words.
Keywords should be in Title tags, and start paragraphs. All engines want to see your keywords in important positions. If you bury your words, with poor sentence structure, clients won't like it, and neither will the engines.
Link from your home page, with key word anchors to your inside pages. This increases your site relevance will increasing the importance of your keywords from the homepage.
Check for clean code on your site. This is easy, and hard. http://validator.w3.org/ is a standard of "Clean Code" in the Internet world. Easy to check, but hard to correct. In my site, I had 32 errors. 18 errors were in my copy. <P> in the wrong places mostly (this is HTML coding for Paragragh). I went thru the code line by line fixing my errors. The other 14 errors are by the site designer, Z-57. GOOD NEWS. I sent them the errors, and they are starting to correct them. www.activerain.comhas 50 errors, Google has 51. Realtor.com has 105 coding errors.
Last hint: MS Word is great to write in, check spelling and sentence structure, Word is lousy to copy and paste text into any web site. Lots of coding errors and additions that mess up search engines. While I will write in word, I copy my text, paste into Notepad (start, accessories, Notepad). Save, Copy, and paste your text. That seems to eliminate all the messy text.
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