Web Hosting, Website Design, E-Business Information » Internet Marketing

Creating A Google Sitemap

manjonka — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 19:33:30 +0000

Adding a sitemap to your website is a great way to help Internet Search Engines find and quickly index your web pages. A sitemap can also provide a “Table of Contents” for your website visitors. There are however two distinct types of sitemap: one for the search engines and the other for human visitors. In this article, we will only focus on Search Engines Sitemap. Although the title of this post may be misleading, the sitemap you will create can be used for all Search Engines not only Google.

Google Sitemap

This sitemap intended for the Search Engines is an XML file (Extensible Markup Language) . It has a preset structure defining the URL, update frequency and crawl priority of each web page you would like to add in the search engine index.

That XML file format and structure is supported by all major Search Engines: Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask. In a nutshell an XML sitemap looks like this:

xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance”
xsi:schemaLocation=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd”>

http://www.web-hosting-reference.com
2010-04-13T01:38:06+00:00
weekly
1.00

http://www.web-hosting-reference.com/category/domain-name
2010-03-25T16:48:23+00:00
weekly
0.5

…
…

For those familiar with XML documents structure, you will notice:

the first line, as always, contains the XML declaration with its version and encoding type ()
the second line specifies the stylesheet associate with the document for presentation purpose.
the third line is the root element ( ….) with the document’s namespace
then follow the … “child nodes” each containing its own child nodes as well.
.. specifies the internet address (URL) of the web page
… encloses the full date and time that web page was last modified.
… defines the frequency you expect that web page will be changed/updated.
.. assigns a crawl priority for each web page. It’s a number ranging from 0.0 to 1.o. The higher the priority the more important that web page will be in the “eyes” of the search engine regarding the crawling rate. In this example, I choose the home page as the highest priority (http://www.web-hosting-reference.com). The home page will be therefore crawled more often by Search Engines.

As you just learned, you can manually create a sitemap for search engines that is if your website contains just a few pages. All you have to is to keep adding … nodes following the markup shown above until you include all your web pages.

However for larger web sites, you are better of having this chore done by a sitemap generator. It’s software program designed specifically for creating sitemaps. The advantages of using a sitemap generator are:
- real time saving
- guarantee that you won’t miss any web page
- and error-free XML markup.

Sitemap Generator

You can find a free sitemap generator online by just typing “google sitemap generator” in your favorite Search Engine. All you need is to specify your website address (e.g. http://www.web-hosting-reference.com) and the program will handle the rest. Within a minute or two, you will have your sitemap file you can upload to your website then just point the Search Engines to it.

My favorite sitemap generator however is “gsitecrawler”. It’s a desktop application by SOFTplus that allows you to create a Google sitemap (all search engines included) for a website of any size. The best part is it’s FREE. You can find the download link by just looking for it using the name above in your favorite Search Engine.

You can choose to exclude certain web pages you do not wish the search engines to index. You can also exclude entire folders or let the program read your “robots.txt” file to determine which files/folders to exclude. This software even reports broken links and pages it cannot access for whatever reason, so you can investigate and fix the issue.

You can automate the process so the software can recreate your sitemap at schedule dates then upload the file to your web hosting server. Did I also mention you can setup as many websites as you want in this software. It can be a very valuable tool for all of you webmasters out there.

Creating and submitting a sitemap to search engines should be part of your SEO and SEM campaign. On an upcoming article, I will show you how to submit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask Search Engines.

E-Business Opportunities

manjonka — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 03:03:02 +0000

Are you looking for an opportunity to make extra cash?
There are literally tons of business opportunities online ranging from data entry, affiliate marketing, selling widgets on E-Bay, using Google AdSense, starting an e-commerce website and the list goes on. Most online ventures require little to no startup cost compared to a traditional offline business.

For instance if you master a given craft, you can post an ad on craigslist and within an hour get response from propectice clients. If you have items to sell you can list them on E-Bay or place an ad on Craigslist in the “For Sale” category.

You can also start an e-commerce site to sell your very own products. Create a custom web site with a shopping cart and credit card payment processing. You can then start advertising your new site to bring traffic and convert those visitors into buyers.

Even if you do not have your own products/services to offer, you can still signup as an affiliate to advertise those products on behalf of the owner in exchange for a commission. Fortunes has been made this way and continue to be made to this day online using affiliate marketing. Aren’t we all the middle-man at any give time during a business transaction?

If you are an expert on a given field and like to write, you can start a blog to share your insights then sell advertisement space to companies offering products/services your blog readers might be interested in.
Not matter which business opportunity you venture into your financial reward will depend on your commitment to succeed. Your online business needs nurturing, working hard to stay ahead of the competition, continuous advertising to get fresh leads and new customers.

Web Site Marketing

manjonka — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 03:01:38 +0000

Getting a targeted traffic to your website is crucial to your success online. Web traffic is the lifeblood of any e-business whether you are offering your services, selling your digital products or any widgets. Without visitors your web site is just like thousands other sites in the web generating no revenue for their owners.

Unlike offline business where the location determines how much traffic a store owner can expect, you need to advertise your web site in order to get traffic.
However you should not loose perspective on the fact that it’s not the traffic that you are ultimately after but converting your site visitors into buyers or customers.

There are countless marketing channels you can use to attract traffic to your website. You can for instance use Google Adwords to buy a placement spot in the paid listing of Google search results. The same can be done with Yahoo and Microsoft AdCenter. You can also tap into the huge traffic in social networks such as MySpace, Twitter and Facebook.

To take advantage of the FREE traffic you could get from a high placement in organic search engines results, some SEO work to increase your site relevance to your target keywords and a good strategy to get quality inbound links to your website will do the trick.

You can start a blog to share some insights, start discussions and slowly build your very own online community. Not only does your blog posts bring more visitors but they also add fresh content to your web site. Search engines will reward you for that.

There are no hard rules for web site marketing because the right strategy depends on your target market.