How Important Is A Site Map,How To Create It?

Sunday, December 14, 2008


What are Site Map: A site map of a website is similar to the table of contents of a book. Sitemaps are important because it guides web surfers to the particular part of the website they have a point of interest in. With it they would save time following links and get right to the point instead.

Sitemaps are also where search engines look at if somebody is looking for a particular keyword or phrase. If you have a site map, you can most likely be searched.

Creating a sitemap, now with software technology surging in, is relatively easier than before. You need not be a programming guru to be one. All need is a notepad, a program editor, and some patience. Here’s how you do it:

Create the listing on a notepad.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a notepad. Any word processing program will do. First off, make sure to type in all the parts and pieces of your website. Include all pages and all links you have. Create it as if you listing the contents of your book. Make a draft first. You’re sure no to miss something out this way.

Create a new page for your sitemap.

You can insert the sitemap on your website on one of its pages or you can create an entirely different page for it. Using your notepad, incorporate all tags necessary to it to make another webpage. Open up your website creator program and tag your sitemap using it. If you have created your website on your own, this will be easy for you.

Create a link for the sitemap.

You won’t be able to view the sitemap if you won’t put a link for it, of course. Create the link on the front page of your website so that visitors can view it right away and be directed appropriately.

Check what have you done.

It is important to validate the functionality of the links you created on the sitemap. Test each and every one in there and if you get an error, be sure to fix it accurately. Run through every single page to make sure that all are accounted for.

Upload your work.

Place the sitemap now on your live browser and double check it. It should function as smoothly as the dry run. Error should be minimal at this stage since you already have verified it locally.

The steps provided herewith is the manual way of creating a sitemap. These days, if you search hard enough on the web, you will find online programs that will do all these work for you. All you have to do it type in the URL or the link of your website and they will create the sitemap with click of a button.

Of course that method is generic. All of you who have created their sitemap that way will have an end product that is all the same, plus there’s that possibility that something else will be inserted in there too. Then again, the process is less taxing and way, way simpler.

But if you want a more personalized output, and you are pretty good with computers and programming yourself, better make one of your own. And since you made your website anyway, creating sitemap is just like creating any other page on the website. Other than you’ll know for sure the links are accurate, you can organize the links the way you prefer it to be. Major parts of the site are emphasized compared to less significant. This is important especially if you are selling products or offering services online.

Sitemap is vital to a website. People search the web a lot for something. If your website has what that particular person is looking for, and your sitemap reports it, then you have a new customer looking at your items. Not only that, they will see some other things up for sale that they might be interested in as well.

Sitemaps, be it generated by a program automatically or you made it yourself, presents the same purpose. That is to lead your visitors to where they’re likely headed, and for you to be seen on the World Wide Web through search spiders. So with these, make sure your website has a sitemap of its own, lets make one now.


Visit the following site to generate a Site Map for your website :


http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/



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Tips to make a Blog Contest successful

Friday, November 28, 2008


Contesting is an amazing viral tool that gets more exposure for your blog provided you use the contest strategically to leverage growth for your blog.

The objective of any contest should be to create a viral effect and increase user ship for your blog.

Tips to make a blog contest successful :

1 ) Don’t rush:
- Don’t start a contest as soon as you launch a blog, get at least about 30 - 40 good articles on your site before lanching a contest, ensure you have decent amount of traffic to your blog atleast 25 - 35 visits a day to your blog, ensure your content encourages interactivitity from your readers in terms of comments at least about 4 - 5 good commments per post.

Once you have the above you can start to work on a contest as you have now created a solid foundation for the contest to be successful.

2 ) Keep the contest simple:
- Keep focused on the objective of being viral, keep the contest very simple. Let the user do a maximum of 5 action oriented things to gain an entry in to your contest. Anything more than 5 will not go well with the user.Respect your users time for contesting.

3 ) Create a viral buzz:
- Ensure that you give entries or points to users to create a viral buzz for your blog. You should leverage social media sites like Stumble Upon and Technorati to favourite your blog, gain visibility and increase ranking.

4 ) Ensure a link strategy for your contest blog:
- Incentivise users with entries to link your contest post to their blog. This is the best natural form of getting noticed by Google. This will result in high Google ranking and high PR in the next update depending on how many sites link to you.

5 ) Use forums effectively:
- Use webmasters forums effectively to ensure that your contest post is visible. Create a contest thread for your blog on these forum to leverage traffic and entries to your blog. Use at least 10 - 12 webmasters forum for this activity. Ensure that each thread on each forum is different, the will help you in not posting duplicate content for your blog online.

Every webmaster forum has a Contest sub section, make use of this to promote your blog.

6 ) Ensure reputable sponsors:
- Good sponsors and prizes are always an attraction for any contest. Ensure you tie up with reputed blog and sites to build attraction for your contest. High the value of the prizes better the response to your blog contest.

7 ) Get high commenting:
- Ensure that you comment intelligently on top traffic blogs in your niche and drive traffic to the contest post instead of your home page.




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