Hi,

We often refer to bike riding while talking about learning. Once learned, never forgotten – right?

​​But what we forget is remembering the process of learning to ride a bike.

Few things:

1. It wasn’t overnight
2. We did not get it right the first time.
3. There were failures and (possibly) bruises involved
4. We did not refer to a video/self help book – we had to actually ride the bike to learn

Learning something new is a process, we need to take action and allow ourselves to fail.

Ditto for our kids. Same for our team.

Think about it!

Who needs a map to navigate a website?

Search engine bots. That’s who.

Just like we navigate places through a map, search engines rely on “sitemaps” to understand the structure of a website and what pages they should “index”.

Technically, search engines look for a sitemap.xml file on your website, if they find it, they will read that and crawl all pages mentioned in it.

If you don’t include a page in the sitemap, it won’t be indexed. If you keep duplicate content in the sitemap, it will reduce the value of your site.

A plugin like Rank Math makes it very easy to create and manage sitemaps. It will provide you settings about what to include in the sitemap and keep updating the file as new content is added to your site. RankMath now even supports IndexNow protocol – pinging search engines instantly when you publish new posts.

The problem with typical sitemaps though, is that there is a lot of duplication and unnecessary content in it. This is a big SEO mistake.

By default, most sitemaps include all your posts and pages, media files, authors, categories, tags, terms (including a lot of WooCommerce or other plugin taxonomies) etc. All those “meta” sitemaps are not necessary since they point back to the same posts and pages.

For example, your authors sitemap will list post authors and links to posts each author has written. But you already have those links mentioned in the “posts” sitemap. So including them again is a clear duplication you must avoid.

Include only unique and useful content in the sitemap

• Go to sitemap settings within Rank Math (or the SEO plugin you use)
• Keep sitemaps enabled only for “top level” items – posts, pages, products, events
• Turn off sitemaps for all content that’s going to be included in top level items, or collections that point to the same top level items. So exclude media attachments, categories, tags, authors and all other terms / taxonomies from sitemaps.
• Turn on options to automatically ping search engines

Exclude individual posts / pages

• Remember the exercise we did in the first SEO article? Listing pages that get hits and deciding what to keep? Now is the time to use that list!
• You may have a lot of pages / posts on site that are not meant for people using search engines. Some pages should only be visible to logged in users. You should exclude all such pages from your sitemap too.
• To exclude a page or post, you will need to go edit it, and locate the SEO plugin widget on that page. Then “No index” it. “No index” means exclude this page altogether from the sitemap. “No follow” means include this page in the sitemap, but do not index links within the page.

Handling missing pages or revisions in site structure

• Sometimes you write some content, then expand it later. Or split it into multiple pages. Sometimes you have a new version of some content. These changes will lead to lower quality pages or a level of duplication.
• Redirection helps you solve this. Redirection means when someone tries to access a particular page, instead of showing them that page, redirect to another page and show that instead.
• If you have incoming links from many other sites, redirection will keep your old links alive but allow you to show the latest page for that old link.
• Your SEO plugin will allow you to set up redirection. Use the “301 redirect” option instead of deleting the page when you create a new page with revised content.
• You can also check the “404” log from your website analytics or SEO plugin to discover pages people are trying to access (through old links or direct entry of the link in the browser) – but failing. For such missing pages with high hits, you should set up a new page with the link that’s failing, and redirect it to a new page.

Sitemaps are really important. Even if you configured sitemaps earlier, take some time today and review all sitemap settings on your site today. And do not miss to review your top pages list and exclude / redirect pages with little or no traffic.

I can keep writing about SEO, but there is no point if you don’t make changes to your site based on what you’re learning. You won’t be able to ride a bike if you only keep looking at it or stay afraid to fall.

Agree?

We’ve already discussed top pages, keywords and sitemaps. Please act on at least two things from these lessons and reply to this email with what you did.

Ok?

I’ll look forward to hearing from you before I write the next lesson!

What’s your real conversion rate?

On average, website conversion rates suck.

Why? Most of the “traffic” is not bothered about your product / service, and won’t convert.

Avinash Kaushik has a theory for this and he calls it the “Opportunity Pie”.

There are people who convert, people who don’t and then folks who’re not “convertible”.

We should exclude the “non convertible” folks to determine our real conversion rate.

That means excluding people who bounce off quickly and don’t have any likelihood of making a purchase / signing up to your list / completing any other goals you have for your site.

Let’s look at how to do this in Google Analytics.

• Open Google Analytics and go to “Behavior – Overview”
• Click on the “Add Segment” box next to “All users” showing 100%.
• You will see some recommended segments here – GA already has Bounced Sessions and Converters. But let’s go ahead and create one of our own.
• Click on the red “New segment” button.
• Select the Behavior tab under new segment conditions.
• Change the “Session Duration” value to be “> 10” per user meaning this segment will only include people who spent more than 10 seconds on the site.
• You will see a live computation of users matching this criterion on the right.
• Name this segment “Opportunity Pie” and save it.

Your reports will now compare “All users” and users in the Opportunity Pie. If you like, go ahead and add the “Converters” segment to the report as well.

Explore a few questions now:

• What traffic sources contribute more to the opportunity pie?
• How does time on site compare between opportunity pie and converters?
• What are top landing pages for people in the opportunity pie?
• Where do they drop off in the conversion funnel?

Do reply to this email and share your findings with me. I’d love to assist you further if you like.

📖

Barking up the wrong tree

This book turns the standard success advice on its head. Much like a trial, Eric Barker looks at both sides of many recommendations about confidence, extroversion and being nice. Some key points:

• Good grades often lead to mediocrity.
• Extroverts make more money, but introverts are better experts.
• The amount of hours you work matters, it’s an undeniable fact.

Eric explores four components of success – happiness, achievements, significance and legacy. It’s an interesting read – or listen (if you’re into audiobooks)!

Checkout this book on Amazon or read a summary of notes from it

A writing prompt

✍

Write down 3-5 things that you would love to happen / accomplish over the next 30 days. Write them in the past tense as if they have already happened – and add as much detail as possible.

Leave some space in your journal so in 30 days time you can report back. Did any of them come true? Are there any signs of them starting to happen?

Reminder: featured images for your blog posts?

I asked you last week – how do you create featured images for your site?

• Do you use stock photos from Pexels or other such collections?
• Do you have a graphic designer who makes featured images?
• Do you use Canva, Photoshop or another graphic app to design yourself?
• Anything else?

I find it challenging to create suitable images for each blog post. Is it a struggle for you too?

Can you please reply to this email and let me know how you make featured images – and if it’s a problem for you too?

Thanks in advance.

Time to take action – do the work, do reply.

Later,