A static page is a page that uses HTML or xHTML programming codes. You can compare the page with the traditional newspaper or magazine that once printed cannot be changed. If you want to make changes, wait for the next print run. Similarly, in case of a static page you cannot edit it until you receive a request for editing the content.

Dynamic page is a new page that uses a program along with a layout to allow the flow of information in and out of the website.

We can’t completely deny that both the page types require a unique optimization strategy. Most of the optimizers usually shrink the word SERP to content development and optimization. But, the type of page you choose will contribute to the positioning of the website and in increasing your return on investment.

Every website has a particular reach and range from the content, popularity and links point of view. So, it doesn’t matter how much compelling a website you have, it cannot compete with Wikipedia. It is true that you can get an additional advantage from the website loaded with pages, if it is structured in a proper way.

Giving preference to content is only one part of SEO; there are 2 other ranking factors that get your site on top results. These include relevant content and link popularity.

Selection of keywords should always be done while keeping your target audience in mind. Analyze the content relevance and value proposition first, if you want to offer a balanced site to search engines and visitors. After all, the position of the website is decided on the basis of the algorithms and ranking criteria fixed by the search engine.

When we talk about dynamic pages, they have a distinct advantage because of the ability to follow the specific industry trends by creating new and unique content using popular keywords. The new content becomes a part of the new post or the new pages.

Static pages are opposite to dynamic pages. You cannot add new content to the page. All one can do is create a page, link it properly to the pertinent pages, do strong on-page optimization and then make it larger with a few hundred links.

But, don’t consider static pages to be a failure, because it is still considered to be an effective way of getting and maintaining a higher page rank. The value in state page would not fluctuate and build a solid platform for ranking unless you link to it or link from it. With a static page, you have the content you want to rank for the page but you cannot always use the off-page link building to widen the scope of getting the site to appear on search engines for the particular keywords.

Database driven programming platform like Drupal, Ajax, .PHP, .ASP or content management system is another way of increasing the internal linking process and organizing the content on the basis of tags or categories. It is true that search engines are more inclined towards fresh content, if the page is configured properly and this increases the chances of better ranking.

The best example one could give to explain the above process is by posting a particular number of articles per week for reinforcing strategic keywords on the pages of a website. Once your website becomes old, you can develop an authority over it by using highly competitive terms in the articles or regular posts. Your website will definitely acquire a higher rank because of link popularity, content relevance and of course traffic.

One more thing you can do with the static page is to feed it with quality inbound links. This will provide buoyancy to the website in search engines.

Every page acquires a ranking at a different level. There are chances that the competitiveness of keywords might get your site an exposure with a few links from the right place. Whereas, you might require thousands of links to reach the position or move up till the site hits the No. 1 Spot.

Static pages have their own benefits and it won’t be fair to say that small sites with old links can’t compete. But, why should you opt for an outdated alternative when your site can have every single page filled with relevant content and a combination of the most effective keywords that would be a cup of tea for search engines.

It is not bad to be content with lesser pages. But, why not have a website where the ratio of keywords to search volume is higher and that is further complemented by link popularity. All this will ultimately result in a better or maybe the highest ranking of the site.

So, how could you make your website popular and get lots of traffic? The best way to get a better return on investment (ROI) is through natural search. If your website ranks well on top search engines, it will definitely get more visitors and a better profit. So, here are a few steps that a small and local business owner should take to optimize the website for search engines.

Selecting the Right Keyword

Keywords play a crucial role in the ranking of your site. By doing a little research, you can pick the right keyword that would provide a higher ranking to the website. There are different density analyzing tools that will tell you the traffic estimates and the competitive nature of the keyword in an organic search. At present, the Google tool tells the PPC competitiveness of the keyword but you can get a good traffic estimate with this. If you select an inappropriate keyword, it means that you are wasting your time.

Recommended Tool : Google Adwords

Analytics

You cannot get traffic on your website unless you know where your visitors are coming from and the search terms or sites that are generating traffic for you. If you know your strengths, you can work more on those areas to get better results. In case you are misguided, you will only end up wasting a lot of money.

Recommended Tool : Google Analytics

Using Meta Tags

Meta tag is a hidden tag that is present in the <HEAD> of an HTML document. It supplies additional information about the document. When search engine crawlers visit a page, they go through the Meta description and titles first & based on that, a site gets its ranking. The easiest Meta tag one could opt for is the meta description tag. It is the brief and concise summary of the page’s content, which is used by search engines during the display of search results.

Profile Submission

Profile submission is emerging as one of the easiest and most effective ways of optimizing a website. Profiles are similar to directories but there are some bad ones that should be avoided. You can submit a profile at Google local. In case you are not a local customer, you can still add a profile and add value to your business.

Directory Submission

There are thousands of directories that can help you in making your website search engine friendly. But, some sites are good whereas, most of them are bad. So, you have to make a careful selection of the directory submission sites that have the highest value.

Acquiring good search engine visibility is necessary for small and local businesses. There are hundreds and thousands of business competitors and these few steps can prove to be a great help in boosting your business. Search engine optimization is a long term investment and these tools are the easiest ways by which businesses can improve their presence on the World Wide Web.

To acquire ROI for longer term, you must get your site built as per the standards. When we talk about standards, it includes POSH, XHTML 1.0, CSS 2.0, which ensures the compatibility of the site with devices like mobile phones, operating systems and browsers. These standards include most of the things that are required for a successful SEO architecture and are thus important.

Following are the ways to improve the architecture of the site for making it more search engine friendly:

Page and Content Structure

Appropriate landing pages for the site are a critical factor for its success, which are guided by keyword research and search engine results pages. You must ensure that the structure of the page supports the inclusion of categories, tags, semantic titles, headings and SEO friendly URLs that will help in the proper optimization of the site. Make the navigation on the page text-based so that the crawlers find something relevant on the page. Ensure that <H3> tags follow <H2> tags and <H2> tags must follow <H1> tags.

Simple to Edit

We often ignore this feature that can make it easy and quick for you to adjust the content of the site. A healthy site is one that has higher visibility on major search engines and you can make the site optimized for better ROI by adding posts or pages to it with relevant title, text and headings. If the site is easy to edit, you will find it easy to add other editors and thus make it more relevant.

Accessibility

One of the best design and architecture ideas is to make the site accessible for visitors with disability. For example, apart from adding alt text into the page, you can make it more accessible by including audio, images and other rich media forms. Web accessibility and SEO go hand-in-hand and the Google Webmaster Guidelines also recommend this combination.

Inclusion of Code

The site architecture must include relevant meta-tags creation on individual pages. You can use tools like Dreamweaver to achieve the individual page properties and WordPress plugins like “All in One SEO ” for creating tags and codes as per the titles you have set. Another thing that would be of great help in this regard is creation of error pages, mostly 404’s. An XML based sitemap made as per the sitemap protocol can do wonders for the search engine ranking of the site. You should not include the heading tags and relevant anchor text, which are a part of standard-based code inclusion.

Rich Media

A site architecture supporting rich media ensures longevity and improved ranking of the site. Apart from improving the “time-on-site” numbers, rich media provides added opportunities to detail the site content for screen readers and search bots. If you will make your videos and podcasts accessible, you will include text alternatives like an audio and video transcript.

Any SEO campaign is not complete without the selection of the right keyword. It is the first and foremost step of the process. Here are some of the best practices on how to use the right keywords:

Anchor Text

Anchor text along with a relevant keyword is an important external link factor. If your site gets inbound links, these will be considered positive for the site and keywords as well.

Heading

Placing a keyword in H1 heading is an important factor but make sure that the keyword should be relevant to the actual text. Ensure that the heading is precise (around 7-10 words). You can include the keyword as the first word of the heading, as it a common issue and one of the best optimization practices.

Domain Name

Use of right keywords in the domain name plays a crucial part in SEO.

Title Tag

You must have seen that search results on any search engine show title tags as the page title. Make sure that the title is short and precise, usually between 6-12 words. Although, you can use the keyword anywhere in the tag but it would be better to put it in the beginning.

URL

A URL helps a lot in higher ranking of the site but make sure that the keyword you are using in the URL should be present in other parts of the page (mainly content). One common mistake we all do is stuffing the keyword that is not only unethical, but you might also end up paying a penalty for this.

Alt Tags

You should label the images on the page with <alt>/<title> tag and do remember to put some keywords into them because spiders love to scroll on these tags to look for relevant keywords.

Beginning the Document

Having a keyword in the first 25-50 words helps in better ranking of the site. Whether it is a table or a paragraph, try to include the keyword in the beginning of the document.

Meta Tags

Search engines like Yahoo and Bing rely on them, while Google does not. If you will properly fill these tags with keywords, it will do no harm to the site but might contribute in its higher ranking.

Other Headlines

Including keywords in other headlines is also a good practice.

Density

Checking density is always better for writing relevant content. Ideally, one should keep the keyword density to less than 10%. The 2-3 targeted keywords can have up to 7-8% density, whereas secondary keywords should have 1-2% density.

Proximity

Proximity here means closeness between 2 or more keywords. If the keywords are closer, they will contribute to a higher ranking. It is always beneficial to have keywords one after another, which means there should be no words between them.

Image Names

Have keywords in the images names.

Synonyms

Search Engines have particular algorithms that also consider synonyms for the keyword match and ranking purpose. This mostly happens in the English language. So, include a synonym of a keyword and see the difference. You should include a synonym for the relevant keyword but don’t work hard to optimize it.

Secondary Keywords

Secondary keywords often called as LSIs can be beneficial for site optimization because they have less competition in comparison to other popular keywords.

Worst Practices

There are some bad or you can say worst practices followed by search engine optimizers just to get a higher ranking for their website. But this ultimately lands up in getting the site spammed by search engines. So, one must avoid taking the below mentioned steps:

• Spelling Mistakes Spelling mistakes leave a bad impression on the visitors. In case the targeted keywords are misspelled and you want to optimize the page for them, use these keywords in Meta tags.
• Keyword Stuffing If the keyword density in your site is more than 10%, then it will called as keyword stuffing. There is a risk of your site getting banned because of such an unethical practice.
• Dilution Excessive inclusion of unrelated keywords for optimization will directly affect the performance of relevant keywords. This will act as a negative point for your website.

It is right that a well deployed keyword will help in bringing qualified and potential traffic to your site that would lead to higher sales. Therefore, you must have a focus and target on specific search terms that are related to the nature of your business.

Here are 10 must-follow SEO techniques for making the site search engine friendly and thus increasing the page rank.

1. Semantic and Valid MarkupNever compromise on the above mentioned factor. It is important that you write meaningful and semantic markup so that it becomes easier for search engine crawlers to extract and classify the relevancy of the page. You can do this by two things:

   By using proper listings and headings.
   By validating the markup .

   There has always been a hot discussion about using <h1> tag for the title/logo of the page, but what is important is that the information on the page should be presented hierarchically by using all the six heading tags.

2. Optimization of Title and Meta TagsIt was a few years ago that developers used to pay special emphasis on Meta tags. But search engines no longer rely on them so you have to shift your focus on the meta tag description as this is the very first thing that will be displayed on the result page below the title.

   The title tag is important for a search engine and it should be different for every page. Make sure the tag is relevant and describes the content of the page. Don’t make it too long.

   There are many useful plugins for managing the title tags and Meta tags for WordPress blog users. All in One SEO pack is one of them.

3. Using alt and Title AttributesA title attribute not only makes the site more accessible but also tells the topic of the site you are linking to, to the search engine. Therefore, you should avoid experimenting things like:

   To see all of our handcrafted clothes, <a href=”#”>Click here</a>

   Instead of this, use should use:

   <a href=”#” title=”See all of our handcrafted clothes”>View all of our handcrafted clothes</a>

   Although, the alt attribute is mainly the same but when it comes to images, the attribute is a way of describing the image to the search engine.

4. Google Webmasters ToolsGoogle will do a lot of work for you if you will add the Google Webmasters Tools, which is linked with your Gmail/Google account to your site. By this, you will get to know how the crawlers index the site and thus, you will be able to figure out the problems with the site. Apart from this, you will see the internal and external links pointing to your website as well as the search queries dropping most of the web traffic to the site.

   This will help you in deciding upon the domain name for the site with or without www so that the page rank doesn’t get divided.

5. Keeping HTML SimpleYou should build the site by only using the markup that is necessary. Try to make the layout as simple as possible by avoiding tables, as all this will help search engines to index the site easily.
6. Avoiding FramesIt is true that frames increase the site loading time and the search engines will find it difficult to crawl the site.

   Try to use noframes content and give a descriptive title with each frame.

7. Use Flash CarefullySearch engines are no more restrained from indexing flash content, but they are still no so good at it. Keep flash to minimum and avoid it for text. You should not use flash for creating menus. The alternative for this is making the same effects by using CSS and JavaScript while keeping the html structure clean.

   Limit the use of flash to embed videos/sound and animation.

8. Breadcrumb NavigationIf you are looking for a secondary navigation aid, use breadcrumb. With this, users will find it easier to move around the site. But you should ensure that the text on the breadcrumb links must describe the accurate content of the related page.
9. Site Map
   
   Apart from creating a sitemap.xml, you should also have a detailed html sitemap page that will pass on the link to every page of the site. The search engines as well as users will easily find content through the site map and don’t forget that lesser clicks to get a page means a better site.
10. Avoid Content DuplicationDuplicate content is always dangerous for search engine rankings. Supposedly, you have a WordPress blog, you will probably have archive pages and a category on the sidebar. All these pages will be a collection of your previous posts, so they can be identical also. For example, if there is a just a post in the category or on a given day, the content on the category/ archive page will be same as the post is.

    This and other content duplication related problem could be solved by using noindex. Follow robots Meta tag by using 301 redirect or a robots.txt file.

Ease of Navigation

A good site is easy to navigate. It should be designed in such a way that you can easily navigate to the desired page, no matter in which part of the site you were. The best way to achieve this is by including a “Back to Homepage” link or button at the top or bottom of the page. In case visitors get lost, they will have the link to at least come back to the beginning of the site.

Another idea is to place a “Back to the Top” button at the bottom, if the page is too long. One more thing to consider is including a contact button at the top or bottom of all the pages if the website is under construction or renovation. In this way, you will not kill the opportunity of visitors contacting you via email, phone or in person.

Site Map

Apart from making the navigation easier, a good site map also helps the search engines to index your site better. Always group the site’s pages under topics. Supposedly you are selling actual services and physical products; place them under two different categories. If you want your website to get crawled faster, keep yourself away from the desire of having each and every page being searched by the spider.

The main characteristic of a good site map is that users find it handy to find a section or page of their interest. Do not forget to directly link the homepage to the site map and make sure that the site map link is a text link, because this is the first thing a search engine robot would look at. Most of the search engines are unable to read Java scripts or image maps.

Make the Design Simple and Intuitive

Just think of the relief you get when you find the new software package or mobile application to be easy and user friendly. The same feeling should come in your website. Make it easier for the visitors to get the necessary information without searching too much. If they will find the site user friendly, expect some more frequent visits from them.

Menus and Links should be Clearly Indicated

You will find many websites that bind us to form an opinion that the person who designed it made it for himself. Don’t be self-centered. There are a few things that are clear to you but may be your users won’t understand them. Just think which one of these two buttons named “Knowledge Base” or “Help” will assist the visitors better.

Clear Design

If your visitor is clueless of where to go or what to do next after coming to the website, this is surely a frustrating experience. The result is people leaving the site as fast as they came. The reason could be anything from a too flashy design, background music, heavy animation or any other multimedia element. Most of us don’t know that search engines are nowadays penalizing websites with too heavy use of graphics.

A cleanly designed website will steal the show. These sites are mostly visited because people do find the information they were looking for without getting confused. The chances of getting repeat visitors also increase.

The Conclusion

Designing a website means investment of energy, time and money. To get maximum benefit from the investment, it is essential to give it a professional look and feel. Your main motive should be getting repeated customers by solving their queries. So why don’t give your visitors a reason to come back?

You can give them a free weekly or monthly newsletter subscription offer where you will talk about the topics that interest readers. Another idea could be writing regular articles on similar topics. Because most of the visitors are keen to get more knowledge, they will definitely become a fan of your website.

Make your visitors feel prestigious by dedicating the website to them. This will increase your number of visits and chances of success.

It is true that a website is more than just a home page. There are many inner pages present in it, which makes the site work and generates potential traffic. The content in the inner pages increases the strength of the website on a search engine and makes the visitors enter your site. It means that the more inner pages you have the better will be your traffic generation.

But the efforts are useless if all the inner pages of your site are not indexed in the search engines. This will hinder you from taking advantage of the extra traffic. So here are some points to consider that will help in getting all the inner pages of the site being included in the search engine.

Finding out the Present Indexing Position

When a spider crawls on the main page of the site, it follows the links to the inner pages and continues to follow it till the time that all the pages have been indexed. If the site is search engine friendly and well constructed, there are chances of all the pages already been indexed? You can find out the index status by visiting MSN, Google or Yahoo and making the following query: www.yoursite.com. The result displayed in the query will tell how many pages of your site have already been indexed.

Improving Site Navigation

In case only the home page and a few inner pages of the site are indexed, it is important that you look at the link and navigation structure of the website. Making changes in the structure will enable search engine spiders to find and follow all the links of your site.

Search engine spiders find it difficult to recognize and follow the links contained in Java script drop-down menu or as hot spots on graphics. In case your website has one of these two navigation structures, add an additional text link navigation system at the bottom of the pages for better indexing. Not only will search engine crawlers find it easy to navigate but also the visitors will get another hassle free & simple way to move to other pages of the site.

An HTML Site Map with Text Links

A site map is a table of contents. On the main page, give a text link to each page of the website by using the title tag of the page as the clickable link and putting the description tag of each page below its link. This will not affect the search engine crawlers but visitors will find it easy to choose the page they want to navigate to.

There are some online website construction software’s with in-built site map generators. If your website is very big, you can use these software’s and create a site map.

Google Sitemaps Program

Google has a sitemaps program specially made to help webmasters in making their site’s pages to be found by the search engine spider. If you want to participate in the program, you need to construct an XML file that has information about every page of your website. The next step is to upload the file to the main directory of the site.

In case, you don’t know how to create an XML file or your website has hundreds of pages, use the XML sitemap generator. One of the best sources to find Google sitemap generator is http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/.

After the XML sitemap is created and uploaded to the server, go to www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps and create your account with Google. The moment you log into the account, you will see a tab on the top of the page saying Add. Click the tab and check the box, add “General Web Sitemap”. You will be required to put a url of the sitemap.

If you have a large database driven site or an e-commerce site with lots of pages, it is important that you opt for the Google sitemaps program so that every page of your site is available in Google searches.

You need to work a little bit more to increase the traffic on your site. For this, check and see the total number of pages that have actually been included on different search engines and then find out the steps to include the other pages also.

The world wide web has thousands of sites giving tips on how you can improve the ranking of your site on search engines. But, most of the times, they will not tell about deadly sins that could harm the SEO process of the site.

We know that keywords are important in SEO, but search engine optimization is much more than just using the right keywords. If the website is not doing well, there is some mistake in the optimization process that you need to know. But, why to wait for the failure of website if we already know the sins to be avoided in the SEO process?

Let’s discuss about the six mistakes that could get your website banned by Google, Yahoo and MSN.

• We are told that search engine optimization is all about choosing keywords and optimizing them all over the pages of the website. This is simple. But, you should never over-optimize the website page. Search engines can sport unnatural usage of keywords and phrases. All the search engines are functioned to give preference to natural flowing text that has a proper keyword density. For example, Google prefers 3-4 percent of keyword density and Yahoo prefers 7 percent. If you will exceed the density limits, search engine will ignore your site.
• Optimizing the page with a large number of totally unrelated keywords is another mistake. Most of us don’t know that the search engine gets confused by seeing a bunch of different and unrelated keywords or phrases. It becomes difficult for search engine to assign a category to the site and the result is site ignorance. All your SEO related hard work will be wasted with this.
• You will find many people saying that creating duplicate pages on the site is the best way to deceive search engine. Never ever think of this. Forget about better rankings, the search engine will not even index your site because of this strategy. And the worst part is that your website could be referred to as Spam by the search engine. And in most extreme cases, even Big Three will ban it.
• Don’t use hidden text for improve search engine rankings. But, what is a hidden text? It is a set of words those are not visible to visitors and are placed on the page just for the search engine to read. White text on white background and black text on black background is a hidden text. The text will be filled with keywords and it is an unethical method of optimization. It could get your website banned by the Big Three.
• Many of us don’t know this, but SEO is an ongoing process. You cannot take chance by resting at peace after finishing the optimization process of a page. Check the results after certain time and you might have to add more keywords depending on the trend of your competitor’s website.
• When you are writing and publishing blog posts, don’t forget HTML heading tags as these help the readers in the post’s structure and ideas.

Appropriate keywords inside these tags should be used as search engines give more preference to these headings and continue to read the content on the basis of information found inside them.

The World Wide Web has evolved from a mere channel of communication and information spreading to the source of business expansion. You cannot ignore the channel that is growing at a rate of 30 percent each year. But, before you decide which internet marketing option to go with, it is essential to have a closer look at both of them.

Search Engine Optimization

You can call SEO as a natural and organic process that involves the optimization of a website by adding keywords, links and meta tags to make it search engine friendly. Through SEO, you can increase the popularity of the site by acquiring or paying for the links pointing to your site.

Pay Per Click

Because more people are turning to the Internet for getting information and search purpose, they are becoming more aware of the paid results as marketing tools. PPC is the perfect example of Internet marketing. A research showed that 38 percent searchers are not only aware of the different between paid and unpaid results, but 54 percent know the different on PPC marketing on Google.

In Pay Per Click advertising, the marketer buys a space on search engine. The campaign helps in getting top position by bidding for certain keywords that are related to the products and services of the marketer.

Both the Internet marketing options have their pros and cons. It is said that SEO is an easy and cost-effective marketing option. But this is not at all true. If you have optimized a website, you need a proper team to monitor its performance and find out if some other site is ranked before your website. SEO is a long process and you need to have deeper understanding of web technologies and search engine algorithms to get top ranking for your site. Therefore, if you opt for an SEO service, confirm if the company is giving you a maintenance contract.

Whether It’s PPC or SEO

If you talk about return on investment or ROI, SEO obviously has higher rates than PPC because:

• It is a common tendency of search engine users that they click more on natural search results than on the PPC ads. Therefore, you get more traffic on site through an SEO campaign, even after paying less.
• Many users say that SEO results are more relevant than the paid results. In a research, 72.3 percent users on Google felt that organic results are more relevant, while 27.7 percent were in favor of PPC results.
• In SEO, you pay and acquire links that point to your website. These links give ever lasting results and a top rank to the site on search engine. Along with this, the links also attract more traffic to the site.

Search Engine Optimization has one of the biggest weaknesses and that is: SEO requires more efforts and time.

You need to invest more time to generate links, tweak the web pages as well as keywords to give ranking to the site. Although, the whole process could take up more than three months, but the benefits will be more.

Such a long list of benefits does not mean that PPC advertising is bad. It has many benefits like you get instant results without waiting for a long period (like you have to do in an SEO campaign). Here are some prominent benefits of PPC:

• What you get with a PPC campaign is an immediate flow of qualified visitors, sales and leads. This will provide you quick results. If you are in no mood to wait for a period of 3 months to get results, PPC is the option for you.
• It is the marketer who decides the budget of a PPC campaign. If you are not happy with the results of the campaign, you are free to discontinue it immediately.
• You can address other sites and portals having affiliate marketing programs through a PPC campaign. This will generate higher traffic for you.

We cannot deny that organic search engine optimization has some advantages over PPC advertising. But, there are certain scenarios and situations where PPC advertising makes more monetary and strategic sense. If you are still confused about choosing the campaign, it is better to experience both. Go for an SEO campaign as well as run a PPC campaign simultaneously to see which one works better for you.

Sitemaps are always complex even if the structure of the web page is very simple. You can create a sitemap in XML or HTML. The XML sitemaps are meant for search engine spiders whereas HTML is for users. These maps have dual advantages – they make on-site navigation easier and also help you in communicating with search engines.

It is essential for every website to have an up-to-date sitemap.xml file, which ensures that all the pages listed on search engines have the latest content. Another benefit of having an XML sitemap is that SiteScan uses the file to generate a list of pages for Google Analytics code.

Creating an XML Sitemap Via Sitemap Generator Tools

The are a number of free tools that will generate sitemap.xml file for your website. In case your site has many pages nothing can be more time saving than this. If the site is smaller with a few dozen or less pages it is always better to create the file manually as the tool does not always find 100% of the site pages.

If you are looking for a good and less complicated online tool, refer to http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

The tool has a 500-page limit and only works for websites that are already online. Google also has one offline tool for sitemap generation that runs on Python scripts. Here’s the link:

http://code.google.com/p/sitemap-generators/

Creating an XML Sitemap Manually

If you want to create a sitemap manually here are the steps to be followed:

• Create a plain text file and name it as “sitemap.xml”.
• Add the following line at the top of the file’s first line – <?xml version=’1.0′ encoding=’UTF-8′?>
  This will show that the type of file is XML.

On the second line add – <urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
With this, web crawlers will know that this is a sitemap file.

• If you want every page of the site to appear in search engine results list all the pages in the following manner:
  <url>
  <loc>http://www.yoursite.com/</loc>
  <lastmod>2008-08-17</lastmod>
  <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
  <priority>0.5</priority>
  </url>

• It is necessary to put the full URL (hostname + path + page) in the <loc></loc> tags

The <priority>, <lastmod> and <changefreq> fields are optional. If you want a better control over how often the web pages will be updated in search results, fill them up.

The <lastmod> field tells the date on which the page was last modified. In this way crawlers will know if there is any update on the page since they last crawled it. You can either use “yyyy-mm-dd” date format or W3C Date time format.

The <changefreq> field tells an approximate number of times the page is updated and thus, giving an idea on how often crawlers can visit the page to get an up-to-date data. You can use values like always, never, hourly, weekly, daily, yearly or monthly.

The <priority> field determines the value of importance of certain pages on a site in comparison to others. This makes the crawlers know which pages to crawl first. The value may be between 0.0 and 1.0. 0.5 is the default value.

One should know that these optional fields are just recommendations and not commands. If you forget to update the last modified field, crawler will still go through it, although the step might take slightly longer time.

• The next step is to enclose all these fields in the <url></url> tags.
• After you have created a <url> entry for the pages you wish to be indexed you have to end every file with the </urlset> tag.
• You must know that sitemaps have a limit of 50,000 pages. If the website has more pages than the determined number, you will have to make multiple sitemap files.
• The last step is to check if the xml file is properly UTF-8 encoded. This ensures that the file can be properly parsed.

How to View a Complete Sitemap.xml File?

After you have made the sitemap.xml file you have to upload it to the root directory of the website. It is the location of your sitemap.xml file that determines the pages to be listed in it. By placing the xml file in the root directory it becomes easier for you to add any page on the site to it.

The web crawlers visiting the site will first see the sitemap file and find out the pages to visit. If you want the crawlers to visit the pages as soon as possible, read the article about adding the sitemap to Google Webmaster tools. This will make your site be crawled within a few days.

You can get more details about XML sitemap files by reading the official documentations.