Over the last months we have been testing Google Sitemaps utility on some of our client mortgage websites and now we can say that Google sitemaps is a great utility. Sitemaps not only gives you a way to submit every page of your website to Google and saty within their webmaster guidelines but can tell you some interesting things about how Google sees your website and how it ranks for various search terms and which search terms actually bring visitors to your mortgage website. Amonght the most useful features for mortgage SEO:
1. A list of the top 20 mortgage search terms your website ranks for over the prior three weeks.
2. A list of the top search terms that actually produce visitors to your mortgage website.
3. A list of the words used in back links to your mortgage website.
4. A list of the common words Google has interpreted from your mortgage web pages.
5. A list of page errors including HTTP errors and pages not found (great way to see if any old/deleted pages remain in Googles index).
6. A table indicating how Google views the page rank of your website pages.
Very useful for watching your site increase in ranking for important search terms but not 100% accurate. If your using a quality tracking program you may see terms that generate referals for you that are not reflected in your sitemap. If you have an ew website expect it to take some months before Google shows you ranking for any search terms. Seems our sites 6 months and older show results while newer ones do not, perhaps this is a reflection of Googles mysterious sand box effect.
It was also interesting to see that google had not cleared out a few pages from a mortgage website were we had changed some page names on a few years ago and Google was still listing the old pages.
We have found a simple software
Softplus gsitecrawler that can generate the sitemap for you and then you can just FTP it to your mortgage website hosting account or you can set it up to FTP it for you.
Hey you don't even need to create sitemap for your mortgage website if you just want to use the monitoring capabilities. All you need do is create the sitemap account, verify that it is your website by either adding some code in the header of your home page or upload a page to your hosting account that Google supplies the page name for.
Best of luck with your mortgage search engine optimization!
Google Sitemaps and Mortgage Websites
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