Creating Sitemaps For Google, MSN AND Yahoo! - The Easy Way

If you own or maintain a website or intend to own one, wouldn't it be great if you get frequent visitors who find satisfaction in getting exactly the information they need from your page?

While that satisfaction largely depends on the contents of your website, how you get to be accessed by website users is the most critical factor of website development.  For if your website canít be reached universally, you defeat the very purpose of the internet: that is, to make information available to any website user from across the world.

How you get to be accessed is actually a matter of presentation style, organization, and most importantly, how fast and extensive search engines get to lead users to your website. Unless your pages are indexed in the search engines they canít send you the free visitors you are all looking for.

Fortunately, the search engines want your content too and there are a number of ways you can help them, which they encourage you to do - by creating sitemaps of your website.  Sitemaps created for the various search engines will enable these search enginesí spiders to crawl faster, more systematically, and more extensively into your websiteís pages.

By doing so, you get the maximum exposure you can.  Such exposure will boost your pride in having your pages viewed, read, and used by more and more visitors the way you intended them to.  On the financial aspect, the more visitors your website gets, the higher your websiteís potential advertising value.

Now with the vast expansion of websites on the internet, it has become necessary to create different types of sitemaps, each having its own complexity in setting up.

<b>HTML Sitemaps</b>

Creating an HTML sitemap linked to and from your home page is something savvy webmasters have been doing for years and perhaps is the simplest to create.  This sitemap is simply a list of pages contained on your site and enables the search engines spiders to easily find your pages, especially the ones that are linked deep in your website that they may have trouble finding otherwise.

<b>TEXT Sitemaps</b>

A text sitemap is simply a list of the URLs of your site in the form of a text file. These can then be submitted to search engines such as <a href="http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request">Yahoo!</a> to notify them that all the pages exist and by doing so invites their spider to visit.

<b>XML Sitemaps</b>

<a href="http://www.google.com">Google</a> launched <a href="https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login">Google Sitemaps</a> as a way for webmasters to give them information they could use to better crawl their sites. This involves creating an XML Sitemap for which they provided their <a href="https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/sitemap-generator.html">Google Sitemap Generator</a>. This can be the most complicated to set up using the tools provided by Google as you need to be running Python on your server. Itís perhaps the most important one too given the current dominance of the search engine.

Setting up all three types of sitemaps may seem a daunting task but luckily there are websites that take the strain out of this and you can create all three within a matter of minutes.

XML-Sitemaps.com is one such site. Originally developed to easily create Google sitemaps for webmasters without an understanding of Python, it has evolved through demand for new features.

It offers the Sitemap Generator that lets you build your sitemap online in four simple steps, for free!  The Sitemap Generator is easy to use and user-friendly even for average computer literates.  Just type in your URL and other parameters (e.g. frequency of change or update that your website will likely undergo, the priority of a specific URL relative to the other pages on the same website, etc.) and follow the ensuing instructions until you get to add your URL to the Google Webmaster account.  You will then be given the options to download your websites sitemaps in XML, HTML and TXT format.  If still you get stuck with a step, you may enquire and get assistance from its technical support.

Go check xml-sitemaps.com for more details or better yet, to get started!

The only limitation of the free sitemap Generator is that it allows only up to 500 pages per website.  Still, this limit is high.  Statistics show that out of the more than 64000 sitemaps generated using this service, the average website size was only 155 pages, way below the 500-page limit.  This figure is represented by 78% of all webmasters who have used the Generator.

However, in case your website falls beyond this limit, you may check out the PHP Sitemap generator script. Offered at a very reasonable price, this  stand-alone script is intended for unlimited-sized sitemaps, which is beyond the capacity of online services.

Whichever search engine or for whatever search purpose, sitemaps are clearly the fastest and most efficient way to navigate this digital highway. The best thing about it is, with these easy-to-use sitemap generators, you donít have to be a computer geek to help keep this internet traffic moving.

Correct Keywords Placement Is Easier To Attain Than You Think

Know what words your customers will use when searching.
You might know what your customers search for. If not, find out. Is it a description of  "pants" or "jeans?" One may be searched more often than the other, but why not target  both? How about "executive gifts?" Maybe "desk accessories" will broaden your web site  marketing strategy.

Ask all kinds of people. Get advice from people in all walks of life including management,  employees, customers, vendors, friends and family on how they would search for effective  search engine positioning keywords. Ask them how they would search for different products  and services. It's really not about what you think they would search for, its about what they  think. Believe me, they can many times be two totally different things.

Once you have successfully harvested a meaningful keyword list, remove any keywords that  are too targeted or not to specific. Also remember that keyword placement is important.  Try to put as many keywords as possible in the beginning paragraphs, and of course the  title line.

The higher the value of the keyword the more competition you will have. Every SEO utilizes  tools similar to the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool and also know the value of a  keyword. The lower the value of the keyword the less competition we will have.

We don't want to aim to low but we also don't want to aim to high. We need to find a middle  ground. For you that may be a keyword with a value of no less than 1000 and no more than  10,000. It will be up to you to determine what you deem reasonable.

Also, the keywords should appear regularly throughout the opening Web page. It is  especially important that they appear frequently in the opening paragraphs.
However, resist the temptation to overuse keywords. The search engines can spot it and will  reduce your page rankings. Tools are available to help with optimal keyword density.  However, avoid software that writes the site's pages. Search engines can sniff these out, too.

A good rule of thumb is: Never sacrifice quality of content for keyword placement. This will  affect your page ranking. Most importantly, your site won't appeal to visitors.

Choosing The Right Keywords

Internet marketing and search engine optimization hinge on knowing what keyword or keywords web search surfers are searching for on the web. By doing extensive keyword analysis you can zero in on the best keyword terms to use when setting up pay per click advertising, writing keyword articles, and optimizing web pages.

Not only is it necessary to know what keywords are searched for the most but also how many times particular keywords have been searched. There are a number of effective tools available for keyword analysis and keyword suggestion.

Yahoo Search Marketing

Yahoo has an excellent tool for helping webmasters and Internet marketers determine what keywords people are searching for on a monthly basis. This tool, located at http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srch/index.php is powered by Yahoo Search Marketing that was previously known as Overture.

Wordtracker

One of the more popular tools for doing keyword research is Wordtracker.
WordTracker can be found at http://www.wordtracker.com/. Keyword results provided by Wordtracker are compiled from Dogpile and Metacrawler. Wordtracker is not free but with the ability to do targeted keyword research the results can quickly pay for the software.

Once you have done some preliminary research you will need to decide which keywords or keyword phrases to target in your Internet marketing campaign. It is best to choose keywords that have a good amount of traffic without too much competition for placement.

For example, letís say you are marketing a variety of photography books and you search on photography only to find that it had more than 1,000,000 searches last month. The competition for placement with this keyword is probably going to be pretty tough. Try researching on more targeted phrases such as nature photography, landscape photography, photography books, etc.

You will likely find that these terms have less monthly searches and much less competition. There will be a lower search to competition ratio. Generally, a keyword with 30,000 to 50,000 monthly searches is going to be one that you can compete for in terms of placement and being found on the search engines. Instead of spinning your wheels marketing for those who are searching for photography instead create multiple campaigns that market to more targeted keyword phrases.

You can evaluate the search to competition ratio by taking the number of searchs of a particular keyword and dividing by the number of web site which return for that keyword when searched. The higher the number the better. For example, if you have a keyword that is searched for 100 times in a month and when you search on that keyword you return 1000 results then the ratio is 100/1000 or 0.10. If you have a keyword that is searched for 100 times but there are 10,000 search return results then the ratio goes down to 0.01. The larger the ratio the better in terms of your ability to be competitive.

Finding the best keywords to use in your web site promotion is vital to effectively driving targeted traffic to your web site. Take the time to find out what people are searching for and your efforts will pay off in terms of traffic and sales conversion.

Choosing Search Optimized Domain Names

Choosing a good domain name for your business website can be very hard but it is also essential to get it right, after all you want it to work for you.  In this article I explore the many different aspects that you should be considering when deciding on a suitable domain name.  I also take you through the steps I follow when choosing an appropriate domain name for my websites.

All things considered what we are trying to achieve is a website domain name that adequately describes your product or service, is broad enough to allow for some growth and scope in product or service, is simple enough for a person to recall and contains your most important keywords/phrases.  From an Internet marketing perspective there are also considerations of company and product branding that may be brought into this specification.  From an SEO perspective it may be better to use an older or established domain name that has been registered and known by the search engines for over a while, these tend to be rated more highly by Google in a respect point of view.

In this article I shall cover choosing the best new domain name that you can without considering your individual marketing or brand requirements.

To do the following tasks I like to have a couple of browser windows open and a spreadsheet program.  It may be required that you signup and login to certain websites, but these are all well known and respectable websites and do this at your discretion.

1. Load up overture inventory keyword volume checker in your browser window.  Type in your product name or service and submit.  Copy the results across into your spreadsheet.

2. load WordTracker in your browser, either using the free trial account or if you have a normal account, login.  Now using the wizard type in the same product or service you type in the previous step.  Run through the wizard and again, highlight and copy your results across into a new space in the spreadsheet.

3. Load up Google Adwords in your browser.  Navigate to tools->keyword tool and type in the same keyword we used in the previous two steps.  Ensure use synonyms are checked.  Copy all words across into selected keywords and click estimate search traffic.  Copy all results into a new space on the spreadsheet.

4. Using the spreadsheet we should have three columns and what we are looking to do is this step is weed out all items that are unrelated or irrelevant by deleting them from the spreadsheet.

5. Sort the three lists by search volume.  Working from the top down, highlighting and copying to a 4th space in the spreadsheet the highest searched on and most relevant phrases.  Repeat these steps until you have the top 10-15 phrases and keywords.

6. Identify your target market.  Are you customers searching for your product in your local region or are they open to World wide suppliers?  Having identified this we should use this as the domain extension (.com, .co.uk, .com.au etc) in the next step

7. Using this basic list identified in step 5, you might be lucky and be in an industry with little or no competition, so what we do here is remove any white space in the phrases and input them directly into your favorite bulk domain name registering tool.  Check them all and see if we are lucky to find one of these is still available for registration.  If the highest searched on term you have identified is still available and this strongly relates to your product/service you should register it now.  If none of these terms is available then try using a dash (-) between words and also try adding words to the domain, like "the" or "buy" to get as close to the highest searched on term that you possibly can.  You can also try re-arranging the words in the sentence.

So, now you have your list of 10+ domain names for your website to choose from and you should feel quite confident that they are relevant to your product or service, contain highly search terms and are short in length.  If you are in debate over which one to choose then always go for relevant and high searched terms first.