Does your website need a sitemap? And if so, where do you get one?
First, let’s talk about what a sitemap is.
A sitemap is a list of web pages on your website that you submit to the search engines to make your site easier to crawl and index. I’ve seen some smaller websites get by without a website, but if you have more than 10 pages on your site, then I’d say a sitemap is definitely necessary. Even if you have fewer than 10 pages on your website, a sitemap could benefit you.
Don’t rely on the search engines to crawl every page on your site. Get a sitemap.
One of the most important benefits to a sitemap is that you can assign priority to your pages. Your home page should have the highest priority. But if you have second and third tier pages on your site, then you can assign a priority to them accordingly. The search engines will crawl those sites based on that priority.
A sitemap is an XML file that you upload to your website and submit to the search engines. You should also include a TXT sitemap, and HTML sitemap, and an ROR sitemap on your site. These are for your human visitors.
There are several sitemap generator websites online. One that I recommend is XML-Sitemaps.com. You generate your sitemap and upload the files to your server.
A sitemap will increase your chances of getting your pages crawled and indexed. You can have a separate sitemap for each section of your website and if you have a large website, then that might be in order. You can also have a video sitemap for your site’s video section. Anything you can do to help the search engines index your website should be done.
Do you have a book in your head? You can translate that book into formats that are easy to read in the palm of your hand. The two leading e-book publishing formats are Kindle and e-Pub. By targeting your manuscript to these formats you will reach about 90% of the e-reading public.
E-books used to exist in PDF and HTML, and that was it. But that was before Amazon revolutionized the publishing industry with its Kindle.
Amazon has the Kindle Direct Publishing program that allows anyone – yes, anyone – to upload a Word document and have it reformatted for the Kindle. Then you can sell it on Amazon and keep 70% of the profits. Likewise, Smashwords will take your Word document and put it through its Meatgrinder churning out a manuscript in as many as 10 formats. Those include:
- HTML
- JavaScript
- Kindle
- E-Pub
- PDF
- RTF
- LRF (for older model Sony Readers)
- Palm Doc
- Plain Text (download)
- and Plain Text (view) – viewable as a web page
So what do you do after you’ve published your book in these formats?
The first thing you do is build a website to promote your book. Then you want to drive traffic to your website, but instead of offering the books for download on your website, you’ll offer a link to Amazon and one to Smashwords where people can go to download your book.
There are two reasons why you do it this way. First, even though your book will have a description and other marketing information at both Amazon and Smashwords, having your own website allows you to include more sales and marketing material than either of the other two services and to present in a format that you have more control over.
The second reason you want your own website for marketing purposes is because you can take advantage of the Amazon and Smashwords affiliate programs.
Amazon pays you 70% royalties on every sale. Smashwords pays you 80%. But you can make more money if you sign up for their affiliate programs. That way you can promote the books on your website and receive a sales commission for each copy you sell in addition to your royalties.
If you want to be a published author, you need a hub – a home on the web. That’s what your website does for you. Become an author today.
Site speed has been an important metric for webmasters for a time now. Recently, Google announced that they have added a site speed metric to its Google Analytics product.
This is good news for webmasters. No longer do you have to guess at how fast your site is loading. And you don’t have to go out and buy a third-party tool to figure it out. If you’ve already got an Analytics account with Google, just login and take a look at your Site Speed Report.
The Overview part of the report gives you a pretty good look at the important information that you should measure. It includes analytics for
- Average page load time by browser
- By country/territory
- By page
These are important overview metrics, but if you want to drill it down even further, then you can do that too. You can view site load times in three ways including Performance, Explorer, or Map Overlay simply by clicking on the appropriate tab.
Intelligence Reports are reports that analyze your website to highlight any variance in your statistics. You can receive alerts when variations occur. You can also view Site Speed metrics in your Intelligence Reports inside your Google Analytics account.
Google is a company that is constantly improving its products. Google Analytics is a free analytics tool that anyone can use, and I’d add that it is perhaps the best analytics tool on the market. There is really no need to pay for analytics when Google provides it all for free.
So what are you waiting for? Do you know how fast your website is loading?
Instead of focusing your local blog on specific keywords designed to push your content up in the search engines (what some people call spam and others refer to as SEO), why not use your local influencers – people and organizations – as well as ordinary people to geotarget your local blog?
I’m talking about your business blog, and I’m talking about an unusual way to accomplish local SEO without simply focusing on churning out keyword-based content designed solely for SEO.
There are a number of ways you can accomplish this, but here are 5 ways that you can use local people and organizations to help you SEO your website locally.
- Hold a contest in which the winner is highlighted on your blog.
- Write a community service blog post once a week where you highlight a local person or organization for its service to the community.
- Choose a customer and make him/her the Customer of the Week. Write up a feature story about that person.
- Once a week or once a month, choose someone who is not a customer and ask them to try your product or service, then interview them about it an publish what they tell you (even if it’s negative).
- Write a story highlighting the 1,000th customer of the week, or something similar.
There are a lot of ways to geotarget your website, but if you try one of these five methods, then the content can naturally be geotargeted for maximum SEO benefits. Just be sure that you say what part of town or the neighborhood the person or organization you are focusing on lives in or does business in. You’ll see your local website geotargeted in no time.
The first thing you should do before you embark on that new viral marketing campaign is to give your website content a complete look over and overhaul it, if necessary. Let’s face it. If your site is more than five years old then chances are it needs an overhaul. So do it.
What does an overhaul mean, exactly?
First, it doesn’t mean redesigning your site from scratch – though that might not be a bad idea either. It may not even mean changing every word on the site. What it probably means, at least in most cases, is to rewrite the content so that it has more a now feel to it and not an outdated feel.
If the information on your site is outdated then you definitely need to rewrite it so that it is more up to date and contains accurate information. For some sites that might mean a complete overhaul. For other sites it could mean simply tweaking a few words or lines here or there to keep the information up to date. Every site is different so every site has different needs.
The bottom line: Viral marketing won’t work if your site is out of date. Keep the content current.
Web design is an important part of doing business online. In the old days, if you had a website it was enough. People were not expecting attractiveness. But today, an ugly website won’t do. Your website needs to have a pretty face.
Your first impression as a business will often be your website. If it looks cluttered and unorganized then people will have that impression of your business and you will lose sales. It is vitally important to focus your web design efforts on three key areas of first impression:
- Attractiveness of design
- Search engine optimization
- User functionality
If you ask which of these is more important, the answer is none of them. They are all equally important. Your web design should be attractiveness enough to keep people interested long enough to read the content. The content needs to search engine optimized so that it attracts the right people through search engine marketing channels. And it needs to be functional and easy to use for your visitors. Miss the mark on any of these and you’ll lose sales. But it all starts with a pretty web design.
Should you respond to negative comments about your business on other websites? Ideally, you’d want to have those conversations on your own blog. A good strategy to use to get people over to your blog for a conversation about your products and services is to write a blog post that addresses a concern made publicly elsewhere. Then, visit the site on which the comment was made and make a short statement about the comment with a link to your site for the fuller explanation. Your comment might look something like this:
Thanks for addressing that issue. You might be interested in this explanation (and include the link here).
This tells people that you take their concerns seriously. It also tells them that you are willing to talk about it. But it also gets them to your blog to talk about it. By getting the conversation going on your website, you can control the flow of the conversation while giving people a chance to voice their concerns and deal with the issue directly where it makes the most sense to do so.
Call it reputation management. But we call it common sense.
One can perform search, social media and pay per click optimization all day long, but without a properly designed and optimized landing page, your conversion rate will be far lower than your campaigns are working to achieve. Here are some tips for creating a good landing page for your site, and in turn, increasing your ROI.
- Create Multiple Landing Pages- This is often overlooked because most people simply assume that a user will take it upon them self to find what they’re looking for. Sure, a well constructed site will make it easier to browse a site, but for anyone searching for specific products, services or information, they more than likely will prefer to be taken straight to what they are looking for. If you’re running an SEO campaign, your title, header and body tags will assist the search engines in finding the appropriate page to return in the result. For a Pay-Per-Click campaign, however, it is up to you to determine which ad brings the user to which page. This is why it is important to optimize your entire site, so that each product or service page can act as a landing page for those keywords specific to the product / service.
- Call To Action- Informative ads are great, but a lot of times, ensuring your customer they can take action is a better way to get conversions. The difference between “Brand Name Toasters” and “Get Brand Name Toasters” can be great. Also, using more than one call to action within your site’s landing page can help your conversion rate. It is important as well to choose less abrasive calls to action, such as a “Try it Now” button instead of a simple “Buy” button.
- Make it Easy to Contact You- We’ve found that a lot of times, users want information before buying, and furthermore, they don’t want to read your entire website in order to get that information. For things like quotes, price comparisons, etc., it may be a good idea to have an easy to find form on your landing page, which will encourage the user to make their inquiry right then and there. Just be sure not to ask for too much personal information, since many users are careful about what they reveal about themselves online.
- Make Browsing an Enjoyable Experience – While the main goal is to take users directly to that for which they are searching, many times, they will want to see what else you have to offer. In this case, it is crucial to have a site that functions well, looks great and does not bombard the user with ads, flash movies and annoying images / sounds. Concerning sounds, there are very few reasons to ever play a sound on your website, and off the top of my head, the only one I can think of is to play music that the user is searching for, in which case there should be a fully functional player that can be stopped, or paused.
- User Control – Just as important as the enjoyability of browsing your site, for a user to be able to browse the way they prefer is a good way to ensure they will not become annoyed and leave. There should be nothing upon landing that prevents the user from clicking links, scrolling, or reading information – including load time. It is good to keep your site simple, but if you must offer a flashy presentation about your product, link the user from the landing page. Your landing page should offer only essential information and graphics, with a link to those interested in learning more or viewing more relavant images. Otherwise, the user may feel forced, leave your site, and never come back
- Thank You – This is key after the conversion. I’ve purchased products on sites that had no thank you message, and simply took me back to the product page after I purchased the item. This can confuse the user, and perhaps make them wonder if they even purchased the product. Additionally, saying thank you lets the user know you appreciate their business, and you can even add a polite call to action like “Please shop online again with us soon.” The key to the Thank You page is polite and, well, thankful.
