Do you need an XML sitemap for SEO, or is an HTML sitemap sufficient?

Question: If you already have a simple nav structure on the home page and a sitemap.xml for Google, do you really need the sitemap.html

Question: E-cast that’s not their page. It’s an On24 page so they have no control over its structure.

Question: Would it ok to keep the non-relevant directories but use robot.txt to tell Google to ignore them?

Question: You can link to recent blog posts with an iframe widget, but I think you said Google can’t see iframe content. So should those be hand made links?

Question: CEA above the fold. Whose fold? What is the basic height x width in pixels you should design for?

Answer: Yes, you do need an HTML sitemap. The XML sitemap is a newer standard, and actually Google is going to reward you for having the clickable path from the home page to every page on the website. So actually do the HTML sitemap first.

As for the On-24 question, that’s a good point. But here’s the deal. IF they wanted to promote each webinar, they could have created an SEO-optimized page prior to the registration page. Moreover, if On-24 knew anything about SEO, they also would optimize that page. Neither company is doing anything in terms of ‘free’ SEO promotion, so a huge opportunity is missed.

As for the robots.txt vs. non-relevant content, I am not sure. Probably you are OK just excluding it via robots.txt. But on the other hand, sometimes Google DOES index content that is listed in robots.txt. It’s not a well observed rule; so if I had a lot of content that was non-related, I would still remove it.

As for your last question, YES, IFRAMES are invisible to Google; so content inside the IFRAME counts for nothing. You need to have them show up ‘server side’ to be worth anything in terms of new content, SEO, etc.