The Real Worth of Sitemap

Among many other techniques and tools, Sitemap is said to be a very effective tool for Google ranking. As its name tells us, Sitemap represents a map of a website's page and link structure. Generally speaking, it's a way to tell Google about pages on a website that Google might not otherwise discover. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on a website, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google's normal crawling process.

Sounds Cool, Uh? Yeah, I agree. However, does it mean that Sitemap is so important that one can't afford to go without it? Not really. Let's say how Google says about the function of Sitemaps:

"
Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:

    * Your site has dynamic content.
    * Your site has pages that aren't easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process—for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or images.
    * Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn't well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)
    * Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

Google doesn't guarantee that we'll crawl or index all of your URLs. For example, we won't crawl or index image URLs contained in your Sitemap. However, we use the data in your Sitemap to learn about your site's structure, which will allow us to improve our crawler schedule and do a better job crawling your site in the future. In most cases, webmasters will benefit from Sitemap submission, and in no case will you be penalized for it.

You can also use a Sitemap to provide additional information about your site, such as the date it was last updated, and how often you expect the page to change.
"
The basic meaning of the above paragraphs is that, Sitemap, as an effective webmaster tool, will certainly add value to your website in terms of help Google crawl your website in a better way. However, it doesn't necessarily follow that your rank in Google will be different with and without Sitemap. The only difference may be that your website, especially the new ones, will be indexed by Google a lot faster with Sitemap submitted to Google.

Arriving here, I bet you have a clearer understanding of the role Sitemap plays in your website promotion process. No doubt Sitemap can have a positive impact on your website. I'm just saying that you don't need to overemphasize its role, let alone pay a good amount of money to purchase Sitemap generating service from somewhere. Even if you still deem Sitemap critical to your business, I guess it's better you get it from Google Webmaster Center for free.

Is Bing Included in Your Promotion Plan

Since its inception, Microsoft's Bing has been getting increasing attention in the search engine market. According to latest stats, Bing's market share has been up for the third straight month and occupies 9.70% share of searches in February 2009. Most of the rises are stolen from the market leader Google, who, on the contrary, has suffered from two consecutive months of slight drops in share of searches. However, Google's market is still far higher than its competitors, at 70.95% in February 2009.

The question is, whether webmasters should include Bing in their website promotion plan? Well, given its increasing weight in search engine market, one definitely can't afford to overlook Bing completely. The good news is, taking Bing into consideration when promoting your website won't take you any further efforts. Let's examine Bing's search engine optimization (SEO) guide first.

According to Bing's official guide regarding to search engine optimization, one should perform the following basic things in order to get a good position in Bing:

• Develop great, original content (including well-implemented  keywords) directed toward your intended audience
• Use well-architected code in your webpages (including images and Sitemaps) so that users’ web browsers and search engine crawlers can read the content you want indexed)
• Earn several, high-quality, authoritative inbound links

As you can see, the guideline above is quite similar to that of Google. This is also the case in reality, which means, a website ranking high in Google normally ranks high in Bing, too. There is only one point that I'd like to point out: New sites generally doesn't rank well in Bing, whereas new sites will have a reasonable rank in Google not long after its launch. Nevertheless, that doesn't change the fact that there are no fundamental differences between Google and Bing with regard to ranking criteria. I guess it's just because Bing doesn't have a update frequency as high as that of Google.

So, from my point of view, Bing should indeed be included in our promotional plan, given its rising influence in the search engine market. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that we need to spend dedicated efforts to learn Bing-specific SEO techniques. As long as both search engines are keyword and syntax based, the underlying fundamentals won't be much different. Only after a truly next generation search engine, which is more intelligent and semantic based, comes out can things become different.

Implication of Twitter's exposure to Google Search

As you may probably know, Google has announced its plan to integrate twitter updates into its search results, with the belief that Google search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data. Today, I'm not going to talk about the private information security issue, which is always the first thing to come to one's mind when talking about that integration. Rather, I'd like to discuss with you about the implication of twitter's exposure to Google search to us webmasters.

Needless to say, twitter will become more important with regard to website promotion. Previously, updates about your business can be only seen by your twitter followers,the number of which is quite limited. After integration within Google search, things become different. Your profile updates will appear in the search results every time someone searches relative keyword through the search box. Just imagine how traditionally you get your website appeared in the search result pages. You probably need to exchange links with others, post replies in forums, post comments in blogs and so on. With twitter profile exposed to Google search, you simply add another effortless channel to direct your Google-targeted promotion efforts.

However, Abusing social network service's promotional capability has always been a tendency among webmasters. I believe that tendency will become more so after Twitter profile gets exposed to Google search. Word of advice, Google and Twitter are not fools, if not more clever than anyone else. If one abuses twitter's promotional capability, he or she will run the risk of getting punished in some way, for example, categorized as spam by either Twitter or Google.

Anyway, Twitter's exposure to Google search is certainly a good news for us webmasters. We just need to be firmly disciplined in order not to abuse its promotional capability. After all, the principle mission of Twitter is to connect people, nothing else.

Google Adwords Tells Us How to Fill In Resource Box

Nowadays many webmasters submit their articles to numerous article directories in return for up to three affiliate text links to their business or websites. Normally article directories will allow the authors to put their affiliate links, together with a short block of descriptive text, in a so called "Resource Box" (Also Known As "Author Bio"). A critical question that must be answered well is, how can authors achieve the highest CTR through those affiliate links placed in the resource box?

Merely listing dull hyperlinks certainly won't work, because few would click the links if they don't know where the links will direct them at first glance. Therefore, the descriptive text accompanied with the hyperlinks become quite important for CTR. The question is how to write them effectively. Don't worry. We can learn from Google Adwords with regard to how to fill in the resource box in an effective way. Let's first take a look at how Google Adwords tell its members how to write effective ad text.

As Google Adwords explains, writing ads is an art. To create compelling ad text, one can apply the following tips:

• Text should be clear and well-written. It should highlight the differentiating characteristics of an advertiser’s product or service.
• Include keywords in the ad title. Since the keyword entered is what people are looking for, ads with keywords in the title stand out.
• Include a call to action. Calls to action are generally action verbs, such as buy, order, and purchase. While find and search may be accurate, these words imply that the user is still in awareness/interest mode.
• Capitalize the words in the display URL. For example, instead of using
  www.warmpuppies.com, use WarmPuppies.com.
• Choose a destination URL that points the visitor to a landing page relevant to the keyword entered. Users who don’t find what is promised immediately are more likely to leave the advertiser’s site.

From my point of view, the tips mentioned above can be perfectly applied to article marketing field with regard to how to write an effective author bio, with just slight adjustments listed below:

• the descriptive text for author box should be clear and well-written. It should highlight the differentiating characteristics of the author's business or website.
• Include your targeted keywords in the descriptive text. Since the keyword entered is what people are looking for, author box with keywords in the descriptive text stands out.
• Include a call to action. Calls to action are generally action verbs, such as buy, order, and purchase, which contribute a lot to increasing visitors' awareness and interest.
• Capitalize the words in the display URL. For example, instead of using
  www.warmpuppies.com, use WarmPuppies.com.
• Choose a destination URL that points the visitor to a landing page relevant to the keyword in the descriptive text. Users who don’t find what is promised immediately are more likely to leave the author’s site. The landing page doesn't need to be always the index page.

Such perfect match as the one between Google Adwords and Resource Box is not uncommon at all in E-Business world. If we can become more conscious about matches of these kinds, I believe our march in E-business world will become a much more effective process.

Open Your Arm for New Site

A couple of days ago, I wrote an article - New Site Deserve More Attention From Webmasters, whose basic idea is to ask webmasters not do overlook the potential value of those new directories and content websites. Today, I'd like to reverse the topic to some extent - Directories should learn to open their arms to accept new sites.

It's not uncommon that directories claim that they don't accept new sites with PR 0. Enforcing this constraint, they hope to maximize the overall quality and credibility of their directory. Personally I wouldn't agree with this claim. On the contrary, I strongly believe that accepting new sites with high quality into their directories does benefit them greatly.

First of all, I don't see any correlation between member sites' PR and directory's own success. The purpose of directory is acting as a parking farm for different categories of website. Unlike content websites for which content quality and uniqueness are top concern, the critical success factors for directories are, but not limited to, the number of websites they contain and diversity of the websites. Rejecting new sites whose PR is still zero, the directory might end up containing only those mature sites which have been already included in numerous other directories. Besides, directories usually offer free one-way text link to other websites, which means giving a free vote to others with regard to PR. So, no matter what the PR of other websites is, the directory's ranking and popularity won't be impacted. The benefit of new site for directories is more obvious when directories ask for reciprocal links from their member websites, since those new websites are much more willing to link to the directories.

Besides, any new site will become old quite soon. Google search engine ranking update, major or minor, is more and more frequent nowadays. It's quite easy for a website to get a bigger than zero PR after doing the basic promotion homework, such as automatic submission to mainstream search engines, posting in forums, social bookmarking and so on. Although the waiting period from old to new is quite short, directories cannot afford to wait until those new sites become old before accepting them. The risks are, the webmasters of those original new websites may no longer be interested in directory submission, given the decreasing importance of directory submission for website promotion. Besides, based on my experience, the enthusiasm of webmasters are much higher at the early days of promotion and it will decrease quite quickly thereafter. If directories fail to seize the opportunity of accepting those new websites at the very beginning, it's highly likely that the opportunity will be gone forever.

According to what was said above, I strongly believe that it's to directories' own interest to accept new websites, especially those with high quality and great potential. Dmoz.org is the best ever example of directory practice. As you know, it pose rigid standard with regard to submitted websites. However, if you look at its submission form, its quite straightforward. No matter the website you submit is new or old, it won't take you much time to get your website across. I suggest other directories learn from Dmoz.org. The best practice is to redesign their submission form to make it open to any website, and leave the screening process to human's hand. That way, it will get exposed to a greater websites pools and at the same time maintain a high level of quality.

Keep Away From Automatic Article Submitter

Nowadays, there are numerous automatic article submitter out there. Although most of them are not free to use, many authors are enticed by their claimed efficiency in article marketing. For me, I always keep a certain distance away from those automatic tools. (The only exception is search engine submission, for which the automatic tools are almost the norm). The major reasons are as follows.

First, not every aspect of the article marketing process should be automated. You can save your time by auto-filling your article content and other related information. However, besides efficiency, you have to take care of the quality of your article as well, which usually can't be well performed by those so called auto submitters. They just take your article as it is and submit it to every article directory, good or bad, in a rude manner just like dumping garbage. Simply put, it's you, the author, that should take the final responsibility to maintain your article quality.

Second, I believe not every article directory welcomes automated submissions. Whenever an article directory grows in polularity with time, it sooner or later will care about the quality and uniqueness of the article submitted by its members. At that time, those articles contributed by automatic article submitter will be easily caught.

Last but not least, with an automatic article submitter, one has the tendency to over submit their articles to as many article directories as possible. This is generally not a good practice in that the uniqueness of their articles doesn't exist any more.

Arriving here, you may want ask, if automatic article submitter is not suggested, what alternatives can I use to increase my article marketing efficiency and at the same time I don't lose the ability to take care of the article quality?

Well, 2 Submit Article may be your right choice. It's a free Massive Manual Article Submitter that endeavors to significantly reduce article submission and social bookmarking efforts of those who want to do article marketing more efficiently in terms of both time and money. In principle, 2 Submit Article is a manual submitter. You have great flexibility with regard to your article quality and which article submission or social bookmarking site to submit or bookmark to. On the one hand, you save your article submission and social bookmarking time to a great extent. On the other hand, you get away from those so called automatic submitters which are usually so hated by article submission sites. Dear authors, why not give it a shot?