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 your work.
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, lest make one.

The major search engines have been collecting images from websites and sorting them by topics, keywords and alt tags. Are you optimizing your images properly to take advantage of this free advertising?

Google’s Image Search forms about 12% of its regular search queries. That’s a lot of searching for graphics. To give you an example, Google’s Image Search accounts for more queries than Ask.com’s regular queries. If your online business lends itself to photos, that percentage could mean a jump to 25-40% of your traffic.

There are a few basic rules to optimizing your images. While optimization is optional, I highly recommend taking the additional 30 seconds to add alt and title tags and proper graphic names. The difference in traffic and income could be drastic.

Some folks shy away from alt tags these days. I still like them and use them to my advantage. The trick is to code the tag so that it provides a line of information to your website visitor.

For example, I have a fitness website that displays photographs of different exercises. The alt tag for a particular exercise would read: Crunch- Keep Belly Button Pulled Into Spine.

In other words, use the alt tag to sum up your main point of having the graphic in the first place. Be sure to include words in your alt tag that help define the picture as well. The alt tag will only display if the graphic does not load, or if your visitor is using a text based browser.

Use the title tag in your images as well. The title tag will display when you move your cursor over an image. The title tag is built into the coding of the image just as the alt tag is. You should also use words that describe the graphic and provide additional information.

Another way to optimize images is in their file names. All graphics have a file name when you save them. This is a simple way to earn points with the search engine! Instead of naming your ab crunch picture 1yhjdk65789.jpg, why not name it ab-crunch.jpg? It’s all about using words to describe the image.

This may be reminding you of keywords. Images should be treated just as your online business content. I’ll even go a step further and say that images should be an integral part of your website content. Use every advantage you have to rank well at the engines!

One caveat: do not spam your alt or title tags. Search engines are growing smarter every day. Build your web business with dignity and honesty. The throwback will be tenfold.

Your hosting company should provide image search traffic analysis of your website. If your hosting company does not provide this, strongly consider switching hosting companies. Graphic and image searches are going to increase in the coming months and years. You must know how it affects your traffic and your bottom line.

Copyright 2006 Lynn VanDyke

Google’s tricks
Ever wonder how fast Google produces search results. Evidently, Google has several servers (rather datacenters, DC) spread all over globe, and depending on host of factors (like perhaps query-load?), one or other returns results when asked. Thus far, this was a fairly accurate guess.

What now seems revealing is that Google’s search results change constantly. That is to say, if first 3 search results now for a query belong to URLs’ A, B and C, it is very possible that similar query after awhile would throw up different results that show first 3 positions belonging to say C, A and an altogether new URL. Why this ‘anomaly’?

The datacenters
To answer the question I’ll take you to what PhilC has to say in thisSEO forum. I quote below:

Google has quite a few separate datacenters (DCs), each of which contain the entire index and the entire algorithms. To all intents and purposes, they are independent of each other. They don’t all contain identical indexes, and they don’t all contain identical algorithms (programs that do the rankings). It means that they often produce different results to each other.

When you do a search, you get the results from whatever datacenter Google chooses at that time. Unless you search a specific DC’s IP address, Google chooses the DC to return the results from, and they choose it with every search you make, including when you click to get the next page of results. It’s not uncommon for the next page of results to be provided by a different DC than the previous page of results.

Does it affect?
You bet it does. According to studies by Professor Thorsten Joachims and colleagues at Cornell University,The Power of Defaults, as many as 42% of users click on top search hit, and 8% click the second hit.

Catch-22 situation, did you say? Well, it really is so. It’s clear no matter how hard one tries to optimize web-page for Google, a top search position is never a guarantee. And if not, … you know what!

Yahoo! admits
Given Google’s hither and thither, Yahoo!’s ‘capitulation’ further rises hackles. What did Yahoo! say?

Chief Financial Officer, Susan Decker has this to say in aninterview. “We don’t think it’s reasonable to assume we’re going to gain a lot of share from Google. It’s not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share.”

Though apprehended widely, it wasn’t before Yahoo! publicly acknowledged Google’s supremacy that people have started to sit up and take a renewed hard look at what the future may await.

Whither SEO practitioners
It’s tough out there. Increasingly so. Google’s recentcrackdownon BMW and Ricoh is an important pointer. It’ll be interesting to see how the SEO experts go about in coming days in this changed scenario.

Whether deliberately or accidentally, these websites get caught by so called (GOOGLE POLICE CRAWLER) and in a similar fashion your site domain goes to a prison cell. While staying in this prison cell for 2-3 or maybe 4 months, google police crawlers revisit the cell to check the status of the website domain.

If the site webmaster or whosoever handling the site notices that the site is not showing on google or any other search engine, and manages to pin point the defect in the site, your website gets back to life, otherwise your site gets life imprisonment for rest of its life, and no one can bring it back, unless you are a hacker and go inside google database to modify your site details.

Normally people ignore POLICE CRAWLER’s in the first place, and later find that it’s too late. If you detect any fluctuations in google rankings, it could be possible that your site is entering Google’s Sandbox.

Google has a rule book of a fickle minded child which changes every 2-3 months, and several sites which do not keep their sites updated with the changes in the algorithm google is using to crawl your site, gets off the track, and ultimately die a slow death.

It’s more like a slow poison, where your site dies not in a single day, but slowly, without your knowledge, because google would never disclose openly that your site has indeed been penalized.

Earlier the sites used to get penalized, and were immediately removed from the google search engine. Like for example, I was given task to restore the site www.yxz.com, about 4 months ago

Now some of the problems facing with the site were

1)Their url was not even showing on google.

Now closely examining site page by page I came to know that one of their pages was pointing to their partner site www.abc.com, which received life imprisonment on google.

2) Moreover both were sharing same IP address, and the site received penalty on google.

Now if you are hiding a criminal in your house, you are also a part of active crime, and police will certainly punish you in the same manner, maybe in a mild fashion.

I explained my theory, and recommended them to remove the link pointing to abc.com, and certain redirections on certain page, but they the owner was bit skeptical about what I was talking and gave me a lecture on “what’s the importance of www.abc.com” for their business, and other Business Jargon

“OK I said”, why not go for flash link on that particular page. and, problem got resolved and site got restored within a month.

The site was banned for more than a years, and nobody in the company looked into the matter why their site is not showing on google.

Thankfully the site got restored, but unluckily manager decided to close the company site since it has suffered great loss over a period of last one year due to several factors, one of them was their ranking on google, which was bringing them customers 30-50 every month from google and other search engines.

Similarly its important for any WEBMASTER, or the owner of the site to keep track of its rankings on google, because if some updates are done to the algorithm, it could be possible that your site is not adhering to the latest algorithm.

Good Luck

SeoHawk

Looking at search today it almost seems like google has lost focus on good search results. The ongoing war against SE spam has changed search technology to the extent that many legitimate webmasters are seeing their sites caught up by friendly fire. Although in saying this many of the webmasters that cry the loudest are the ones breaking the rules and pushing the boundaries. Google is smart and plenty of people like to take pot shots at the tall poppy of the search world but I would not want the responsibility of trying to manage and police the worlds biggest search tool. When you look at what they have to contend with in terms of spam in the form of scraper sites and massive amounts of duplicate content, throw in data storage and crawling on an ever increasing and uncharted scale and you are going to encounter many “issues” as you move forward. The KISS (keep it simple stupid) theory is no longer in play here, search technology is much more complex with new algorithms coming into play all the time.

Looking around atSEOforums you read all sorts of things about a google conspiracy and webmasters being forced to buy adwords because they simply can’t get the volume of traffic from organic search any more. What many webmasters are seeing today is pages drop from the google index on large scale and a constant shifting of the results across the different google data centers, also large numbers of supplemental results being reported for sites. Corresponding drops in traffic and very upset webmasters who are caught in the fallout, in some ways Google is the victim of it’s own dominance as are the many webmasters who catch a cold when google has a sneeze. Adwords is not the motive for the constant flux as has been suggested by a few, when you examine things adwords needs it’s network of partner sites to generate traffic in order to keep the revenues flowing and of course good search technology  results play a major part in the cycle. I don’t think it is any more complex than that. Because google is so dominant it’s the greatest source of free traffic in the world, this makes them the biggest target in the world which in turn gives them the hardest job in the world. You can’t keep all of the people happy all of the time some blood is going to get spilled along the way. The biggest enemy of the webmaster is the other webmaster busy putting together a massive auto generated database driven spam site to flood the search engines.

 Is google winning the battle here? The latest series of google updates would suggest to some extent yes they are making headway in some areas although as I write this there are some strange results being served up from a lot of the google data centers right now, we have been monitoring a few of the large spam sites and one or two seem to have resurfaced during the current data push. This I would expect to be only a temporary situation but it is a concern to see in some sectors that good sites fall out of the rankings and sites of lesser quality getting a reward even if it is only temporary. Google shoulders enormous responsibility and the question of accountability is an interesting subject, if google changes it’s algorithm and the whole search world turns upside down the effects can be far reaching and very damaging for online business, we are not talking about small numbers here. Of course some would argue there are winners and losers as the total number of searches remains about the same so if I am not getting clicks then some other business is? Maybe this is the case but with investment in infrastructure and stock and employees an online business needs to consider it’s reliance on organic search results and the revenue generated from this otherwise you might just be caught without a chair when the music stops.

What we tell our clients is simple, build clean sites for your users with original content - forget to a certain extent that a machine is going to crawl your site and make it people friendly. Clean sites, clean code with good intuitive link structure, good relative text this is very much a back to basics approach but it works and the search engines will reward you. Don’t fall for the “we can get you to number 1 in google” trap, it’s not a bad idea to stay away form anyone who makes this promise because not one can guarantee a search ranking. Use resources that benefit your users and don’t try to cheat or manipulate your position in the engines. Goodonline marketingand promotion will go along way. Look at all of your options for traffic generation and don’t put all of your eggs in the google basket!

Updating your website everyday and adding some materials will help you get noticed by the search engines. So, if you are going to sell any type of product or service online, you have to optimize your website for the search engines, in order to boost traffic and sales. It is because over 90% of your business will likely come directly from search engine results. And for that reason, it is absolutely important to optimize your site for search engines for you to have the greatest deals in the entire world.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process by which webmasters or online business owners utilize strategic copy to augment their website’s status. It is certain that the internet has grown so fast over the years and the competition for the best search engine position has created an enormous market. Therefore, better understanding the fundamental elements of Search Engine Optimization is vital for an online business’ success.

Making use of effective search engine optimization techniques will improve the page rank of your website. There are many tricks that can be used to increase page rank; the most effective method is to provide high quality content consistently. This seems like a simple concept but there are many websites that fails to provide content that visitors find interesting. Sites which provide content that are interesting, well-written and regularly updated create highly engaged visitors who are more likely to return to the website in the coming days. So, if you can set your website apart from those boring, lifeless sites then do it. You’ll surely have a step closer to achieving high page rank through search engine optimization.

The next significant factor for an effective search engine optimization is to include keywords and phrases within your content. To make sure that you are properly targeting your market, you have to make sure that the keywords and phrases you have on your site are the keywords and phrases that your site is actually optimized for. The more keywords you use in your content, the more likely it is that online visitors will find your site when they do some research with those words. If you are unfailing with these techniques, then your overall search engine optimization will increase, boosting your page rank.

You should also have to develop a linking strategy as a part of your search engine optimization. Not only does this provide free advertising for your site, but it makes the impression that your site is imperative because of its affiliated links. For each link that you have pointing back to you, that is another chance for your potential customer to find you. The more inbound links that you have pointing to your site, the higher you will be ranked in the search engines.

Another is to develop a content stratagem. People who get to search from the internet are looking for information. The more information you provide for them and the more helpful it is, the more likely you will make the sale. Writing articles is the most effective way to build up content for your site. When writing articles to post on your site, make sure that you develop a clear means of arranging their content. You can do this by simply adding a new page to your site. This will allow room for extra articles to be added as you write them, and will allow you to build up an archive of articles which will maintain to draw online visitors. Make sure also that you have included your archived articles in a directory that is next to the root web of your site so that the search engines will catalog your online articles.

Always keep in mind that search engine optimization methods are important in developing your site’s status. With that thing in mind, make sure that you write high-quality, keyword rich content and link your site to and from a deliberate family of other sites. These things will help improve your site’s popularity and coerce increased business through your online business.

Before you do any kind of promotion on the internet, you need to make sure that your site is properly prepared for the search engines. The reason is that the search engines will be the main way that others find you on the internet.

If you haven’t optimized your site for the search engines, now is the time to do it.

There are two tools that you can use, that are absolutely free, to optimize your website. Keep in mind that your main focus should be on optimizing individual pages for various keyword terms on your topic.

Good Keywords - http://www.goodkeywords.com - This tool will tell you what others are searching for, as well as how often the search terms are searched for in a month. Windows.

Web CEO - http://www.webceo.com - This software suite will not only help you optimize your pages for the search engines, but it will help you find link partners, as well as keyword terms, and you can use it to submit to other lesser known search engines. Windows and MAC.

It is beyond the scope of this article to teach you how to optimize your site for the search engines. Web CEO contains step by step documentation that will teach you everything you need to know about search engine optimization.

What’s important here is that you find out specifically what keywords and keyword phrases searchers are looking for when searching. If you optimize your site for the wrong keyword search terms, either no one will find you, or you will have so much competition, you won’t be able to get your site to rank very high.

Most searchers won’t go beyond the first three pages of results. Rank below this, and you’ll have a tough time being found.

Another important point to remember is that each of the main search engines is different. You can optimize your site for Google, which is the most important search engine right now, but you can optimize your site for indexing in all of the major search engines if you do it right.

Avoid techniques like keyword stuffing, redirect pages that are unrelated to your site, and junk pages. Multiple domains pointing to the same site or a mirror site are a definite no no.

Although there is some debate these days about using other writers’ articles because of the duplicate content rule, remember that all of the major search engines are full of duplicate content.

Using articles written by other authors is a great way to provide value to your site visitors, but you will want to write a few of your own articles. By writing your own articles, you can optimize them for your keyword terms, something you can’t do with other writers’ articles.

When you write your articles, convert them to HTML and then use Web CEO to optimize them for your keyword terms. Make sure you focus on no more than two to three terms per page, or you will have problems optimizing your page. You want your articles to make sense, and you want them to provide value to your readers.

Finally, once you’ve optimized your site, you’ll want to make sure that you submit them to the major search engines. Although there is some debate these days over whether or not this is necessary, the major search engines aren’t perfect, and they don’t always update properly.

Once you’ve submitted your sites, you can move on to the next steps in your internet marketing campaign. Resubmit only when you’ve made major changes to your sites.

Search engine optimization and submission is a long term marketing strategy. Good ranking, as well as good coverage of your site won’t happen overnight. It will happen though if you stick to good search engine optimization techniques to improve your site’s ranking.

I believe Exchanging Links is one of, if not “the” best way to market your site online! Read below to see why.

Some people believe that in order to be successful online they have to direct thousands of targeted visitors to their site. TRUE
They also believe that they have to spend all their time adjusting the scripts and contents of their pages, to make the search engines spider them and rank them well. FALSE!

They believe that if they do this it will improve their ranking and automatically drive targeted visitors to their site by the ship load. Partly TRUE, but after viewing some server logs belonging to a top ranking (first 1 – 5 sites on the first page, in his niche)
I saw that only a small number of visitors came from search engines!
And the major majority of clicks came from reciprocal links.

It’s true that there are some quick and easy scripts and txt files etc… that you can place in all your pages, and on your server, that will guide the spiders to keep coming back and also guide them to index your pages, this doesn’t take long to do and I believe it helps a little. But the search engines are smart and always changing there systems so someone could work for weeks, too tweak a site for SEO, only to find out that the rules have changed again and their site is no where to be found! So focusing purely on SEO can be risky!

Should we focus on getting high ranking as a priority? Or should high ranking be seen as the result of other marketing and promotional strategies that bring even more visitors that are even more targeted.
The result of having more visitors being that our ranking will increase.
Not by using strings and mirrors to “fool” the search engines into thinking we have a great site, when really, we don’t have many visitors which is why we’re trying to trick the search engines, and don’t have great content or services, because the visitor has come to our site looking for some that we tricked the search engine into thinking that we had! This is like putting the cart before the horse.

If we focus on building a network of “reciprocal links” (that’s a link from you to someone and a link from them to you) we add valuable content to our users and we have other businesses in our target market niche, sending highly targeted and motivated users to our site.
The search engines like this because there are more sites saying, this is a good site, and every time those sites get spidered the bots find our link and keep on coming back to our site!

So that helps with search engine ranking, and driving targeted traffic, and adding valuable content.

We want our prospects, users, and customers to “bookmark” or save our site in “favorites” they will do this if they are interested in our “Niche” and learn that they can get all the information they ever need from our site. Of course they are more likely to read our newsletters and take notice of our promotions etc, on the home page.

If someone goes to Google and does a search, that person will find that most of the top ranking sites have a “Link Directory” this is a directory of reciprocal links. Doesn’t that tell you something?

Here’s another reason to create a link directory, when you create a directory it is created around sites that are related to your business market niche, therefore, when your site gets crawled by the spiders, they see that you’ve done their job for them, they also like this.

So to summarize:

Search Engine Optimization, is important, and helps to bring more visitors.

Link Exchanging, is important because it can drive more visitors then search engines, once established. Directories ad valuable content for your customers/visitors, and this it improves your SEO.

There are many other free strategies for promoting your online business; this is just an overview of two of them. Obviously another way to promote your business for free, is Article submissions, this is also one of the quickest and most effective free advertising strategies available online.

Why spend thousands of dollars on search engine optimization, when you can do it yourself? Yes it is true. By using technology and some good reading, you can raise your site to the top most ranking in the matter of days. The cost is nominal and will not go above $150. Search engine optimizing software will not only save you money but it will also allow you to do things the easy way through the various wizards. Almost all the work for you is done by the software allowing you to spend time with the site itself.

One such software is Web Position Gold. With features like automatic submitter, reports and traffic analysis, it is a gem of a software program for any serious business owner or web master.

Let us take a close look at some of its features. The most important feature of this software is the Submitter. It is a real time saver. You just select the web pages or files, and search engines you want to submit and it does all the submitting while you do something else. It even keeps track of everything to make sure you don’t span the search engines and that all the pages are submitted.

The search engine ranking reporter is another feature you will love. Running reports using thousands of keywords at a time is no problem. Keywords are very important in the search engine industry. These words are used by your visitors to reach your site. So it is important to run popular reports on what words are best for your business and this software does it for you. It also includes a handy feature where you can spy on your competitors.

With all the above features the software still offers more. The Page Critic supplies expert, custom-tailored advice on how to optimize each of your new or existing web pages. Page Generator creates optimized web pages based on keywords and details you enter about your business. Upload Manager remembers all the optimized Web pages you created, changed, or added. Scheduler activates the Reporter daily, weekly, or monthly to automatically check your web site’s rankings. Add an excellent and qualified customer care team that answers e mails within hours and provides a toll free number web position gold is a serious requirement for any business that is serious about its online presence.

We know that a web site cannot succeed without proper search engine optimization. However, an expert will charge a lot of money and learn about your business before he starts work. Search engine optimizing software gives you the opportunity to do that work at a fraction of the cost. Not only is the cost factor important, but you are the best judge of your company hence you can use that power to stay on top with all the repetitive work done by the optimization software.

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