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I'm wanting to prioritize my on-page optimization efforts by doing the work that will have the most impact first.

Let's say, hypothetically, that this was my on-page report card:

Grade A - 60 reports
Grade B - 20 reports
Grade C - 70 reports
Grade D - 70 reports
Grade F - 300 reports

Where is the biggest opportunity for increasing good traffic?

• Doing more work on Grade A pages to ensure I continue to rank
• Moving mid-grade pages up to high-grade pages (e.g., raising a B to A, or a C to B)
• Moving low-grade pages up to mid-grade pages (e.g., raising a D to C, or a F to D)

Jenny,

Take a look at this post in the forums on indexing issues with site search - http://www.seomoz.org/q/block-search-engines-from-urls-created-by-internal-search-engine.

Allowing site search to be indexed can result in a ton of duplicate content on your site. I recommend taking the meta noindex approach.

Google will look for /sitemaps.xml. This is pretty standard.

Some people may not name it that way - not advised. But if you're using the other sitemaps for images, videos, etc, then you can use the robots.txt file to tell search engines where they are explicitly.

Also, be sure to set up an account at http://www.google.com/webmasters/ and submit your sitemaps there.

If you have ftp access to the root, you can simply overwrite the current one with a new one. Google will pick it up.

Also, you should include a link to all your sitemaps in a robots.txt file - also in the root. If you look at SEOMoz's robots.txt file, you can see how to do that. http://www.seomoz.org/robots.txt

You can probably set it to ignore parameters you don't want added to the sitemap. Here's a screenshot from my standalone version to give you an idea of the settings.

LFfMo.jpg

I bought the standalone version of http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/standalone-google-sitemap-generator.html in 2007 or 8 and have really liked it. They've really kept the product updated, but the $19.99 price hasn't changed since.

It gives you a high degree of control, supports really large websites, generates multiple sitemaps (xml, image, video, news, mobile, ror, etc.) and more. Plus, updates are free for life once you purchase.

Use the free generator on the homepage to see how it works.