The Importance Of A Sitemap For Your Internet Business

Over the last few days I have been helping my clients submit their sitemaps to Google, Yahoo and MSN to inform search engines to crawl through their websites. What I have noticed is that sitemap submission is a much faster way for websites to be found in search engines rather than using the search engine submission tool provided. After speaking to a few people and my clients I have noticed that people are not aware of this process because it is not shared. I personally think that it does help and is a must do for any Internet business as part of their search engine optimisation strategy.

What Is A Sitemap?

I want to share with you the two types of Sitemaps. For the more technical terminology and detailed definition please read Google’s About Sitemap.

1. Sitemap For Your Website
   This is what Wikipedia defines the term Sitemap as:

   A site map (or sitemap) is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site.

   Additionally having a sitemap for your website will help any visitor browse through all sections at just one page, rather than clicking through to different parts of the website. You can see my sitemap and get an idea of what it looks like.

2. Sitemap For Search Engines
   There is a term that web developers refer to when creating sitemaps and it is called XML Sitemaps. Google introduced this term and it helps web developers publish lists of links from across their sites. Basically it is a simple version for search engines to use when they are crawling through any website. Currently Google, MSN, Yahoo and Ask now jointly support this. You can view my Sitemap XML to see how it looks like. Since MSN, Yahoo, Ask, and Google use the XML Sitemap, it is wise to have one on your website in your parent directory. Though, the search engines do not guarantee all links will be crawled, and being crawled does not guarantee being indexed, it is still the best insurance for getting a search engine to find your website. Also, XML sitemaps have replaced the older method of “submitting to search engines” by filling out a form on the search engine’s submission page. Most web developers submit a sitemap directly, or wait for search engines to find it.

The Importance Of A Sitemap

Easy Navigation
A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site. If your visitors browses your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.

Having A Consistent Site Theme
When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to get the “big picture” of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors’ time.

Search Engine Optimisation
When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every single page on your site. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page — they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website.

Organisation And Relevance
A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird’s eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organised site with everything sorted according to their relevance.

This is why it is most important to implement a sitemap for website projects with a considerable size. Through this way, you will be able to keep your website easily accessible and neatly organised for everyone who uses your website.

For further information about sitemaps, visit sitemap.org

Tyrone Shum
Sitemapping My Websites

My Top 10 Profitable Wordpress Plugins

I’ve noticed a lot of people are interested to install lots of plugins but really don’t make it profitable on their blog. You can have over 50 plugins that all work and make noise, but none of them are any good to make your blog stand out. (Additionally, my term of profitable also refers to helping you market your blog and also creating a brand). Since most plugins are free, it’s very easy to find them on the Internet and install them with Wordpress 2.71. Furthermore I’ve provided a link to the download page for each plugin. Hope this list will help others and it’s in alphabetical order, enjoy!

Add Post Footer
The Add Post Footer is very useful in helping you cross sell products, a free eBook to encourage readers to subscribe or other top articles that are related to your post. It allows you to enter HTML code into the footer of every post you write and is very simple to use.

All in One SEO Pack
As you can see from the name of the plugin – it’s an all in one SEO pack that assists each post in your blog to be “search engine optimised”. You can either leave your header, meta tags and description of your post just the way they are when you publish, or you can fine tune them to be more specific to keywords you want to use for search engines. I’ve found at times I wanted to add additional keywords and change the description of my post instead of having the default Wordpress summarised description. A must have plug-in for serious Internet marketers!

Bird Feeder
If you’re on Twitter and want to save time twitting – the Bird Feeder plugin will automatically feed your most recent posts in the format of: [your message] [post title] [short url] to Twitter. It’s great because you won’t have to double up by copying and pasting your posts back into Twitter or be on Twitter 24/7 (if you’re not already).

FeedBurner FeedSmith
This little gem, the FeedBurner FeedSmith takes your blog’s feed and redirects it to Feedburner. It’s better branding for your site and you won’t have FeedBurner’s domain name showing when a reader clicks on your RSS feed button, e.g. feeds2.feedburner.com/internetbusinesspath becomes internetbusinesspath.com/feed. For more detailed instructions.

Google XML Sitemaps
If you want to be found on Google, then Google XML Sitemaps plugin is a requirement for your blog. This plugin creates a compliant XML sitemap for the Google bots to crawl your site and it will help your blog achieve higher rankings if you want to be found on their search engine. Once you’ve install this plugin don’t forget to hop onto Google Webmaster Tools to let them know you’ve got a sitemap for them to crawl, otherwise Google won’t know.

Max Banner Ads
Monetising and profiting from your blog couldn’t be any easier. If you have advertisers and want a very streamline and easy way to insert their ads onto your blog, then Max Banner Ads is the plugin for you. I use this on my blog and it’s saved me a lot of time. It’s easy to use and can be very profitable for your blog.

RSS Feed Signature
The RSS Feed Signature is another great plugin to use within your RSS Feeds. It simply adds a customised signature to any RSS Feed that goes out to your subscribers. If you are keen on increasing your subscribers, I would suggest installing this plugin and add a “free eBook offer” to your RSS signature. If you subscribe to my RSS Feed you’ll see the link at the bottom of each feed to take you to the free eBook offer. You can read more about how to download your free eBook from the RSS feed.

Top Commentators Widget
This plugin allows your blog to display a user who has posted the most comments. The Top Commentators Widget shows other readers your highest commentator and will encourage people to find out who they are by clicking on their name. Also the highest commentators websites will be linked automatically onto your blog and can increase your search engine rankings as well. Therefore getting you more traffic and more comments all at the same time.

What Would Seth Godin Do
Most people would know Seth Godin as his name is associated with Internet Marketing Guru. The What Would Seth Godin Do plugin simply displays a welcome message on your blog for first time and returning users. It may ask them to subscribe if they’re a first time user or thank them for coming. It’s a great tool to have to create the “experience” for a user coming to your blog.

Wordpress Simple Paypal Shopping cart
If you’re like me who offers advertising on my blog and needs a simple way for advertisers to pay you, then the Wordpress Simple Paypal Shopping cart is an easy plugin to install and use. It allows anyone to pay you using Paypal which is used by millions of people worldwide and can save you time having to respond to advertiser’s email with your bank account details and so forth. The plugin has functions to let you add a “Add to cart” button and creates a shopping cart module when the advertiser or user decides to pay you. It will then redirect them to the Paypal website to pay. Very simple to use!

If you haven’t tried any of the plugins above I would highly recommend adding them to your blog. So give it a go!

Tyrone Shum
The Plugins Guy