Promote Websites

English HTML and XML sitemap tutorials:

• Compilation of HTML sitemap tutorials explaining best usage and guidelines.
• XML sitemaps guide on how to crawl website, handle robots.txt, create, submit and ping sitemaps.
• Tutorial about the Google XML sitemaps extension: image sitemaps.
• Comparison of all sitemap file formats including RSS, ROR, HTML, XHTML, XML, Text etc.

German HTML and XML sitemap tutorials:

• Anleitungen und Hilfe für XML Sitemaps contains XML sitemap guides in German.

Webmaster forums are great to learn about website marketing and website promotion. If you are new to website marketing and optimization, your first priority should be to join various webmaster forums to learn more about SEO and website promotion.

Webmaster forums usually have different sections, each focusing on a specific part of running a website, e.g. search engine optimization, advertising, getting business clients offline etc. When you join a website forum, the first thing you need to do is read the rules and regulations posted in the forum by the administrators or moderators. See how you can help others by posting replies and how you can post questions in the categories you need help. Remember, great forums have great communities of people helping each other! (Of course, there could be some off-balanced members who only have unhelpful replies, but even if you encounter those, remember that forums reflect society with both good and bad people.) When seeking answers you can trust, look around for members who have been members for a long time. They are the people who can help you out with your website related questions.

If you search Google for top website webmaster forums, you will find lots of quality community forums. Some general guidelines include picking good user names! If you use “aaabbb” kind of user names that make no sense, you risk getting deleted by moderators who think you are a person getting ready to spam their forum. Picking a good name from the start is also important in building up trust and recognition in a forum community.

To sum up, website forums play an important role in the internet. Besides just getting help with problems, they can also connect you to people who you might want and need to do business with in the future. Buying, selling and trading services is popular in many forums. Such services can include anything from website design, graphic, programming and website promotion. If you are lucky, you might even find people that can help you starting a business or joint venture.

Some of the popular webmaster forums include V7N, Digital Point, Web Help Forums, SEO Chat and SitePoint.

The sitemap generators blog features a new video about making website sitemaps using a sitemap generator tool:

The video demonstrates A1 Sitemap Generator and was made by Tom Edwards. You can check his video marketing website and YouTube video channel for more videos covering various software products and tools.

My friend Allan Walker from Highforce Website Design reminded me today that good website design is part of website promotion. And he is right. Therefore, I am adding this post

Website Promotion Is More Than Keywords and Titles.
When customers reach your website, you need to make them interested in your products and make it easy for them to find product information. This also means your website should not scare off potential customers. A clean crisp layout with clear information on your products is a must for getting sales. Take great care in what kind of website and company you have. If you just sell one or two products, your website should look very differently from a general purpose shopping cart website with thousands of products.

Understanding Customer Behavior
Test your website design using website analysis software. See how people navigate and what they search for in your website. Maybe they are searching for something you have, but under a different name? Be sure to test your various website design elements such as logos and headers. Sometimes small changes in website design can yield much better conversion rates.

Provide Contact Information
Many potential customers will look up your contact information. Some just to know you are not a no-name organization, other to actually email or call you with support questions. Be sure to provide contact information in an easy to spot place, e.g. through a prominent link or at bottom of your website pages. This will also help ensure people trust your website.

The Social Factor
Have a good website design with clear information on your products will also increase chances of people bookmarking your website, perhaps even adding it to their favorite social sites such as Twitter. If you have a dull website layout that looks boring and with product information hidden away, chances are your website promotion will fail miserably as well!

Internal Linking in Your Website
Ever been wondering if the internal link juice in your website is distributed in the most optimal way?

If you ensure that your internals links flow link power to your important pages, you have improved chances of having search engines index and rank them. Channeling internal website links to your important pages is a SEO process also known as PageRank Sculpting.

PageRank Sculpting Explained
PageRank is the name of the Google search engine algorithm used to calculate importance of pages. It is done by calculating links and linking patterns across the entire internet. Google PageRank is one of many algorithms Google use to calculate and rank your pages in search engine result pages. But even with that said, pages with a high PageRank are more likely to bet get indexed more often and ranked higher in search results.

Realizing that internal links distribute link juice and PageRank scores across your website, it becomes an important factor when trying to optimize for search engine indexing and ranking.

If you optimize the internal linking to focus on your most important pages, you can give them a boost in search engines and search result rankings. This is the technique known as PageRank sculpting by people in the search engine optimization and website marketing industries.

List of Tips to Improve Link Juice Flow
Experiment with link analyzer tools that can analyze and show how internal links flow juice and power to all your website pages. One such program is this website link analyzer.

Avoid leaking too much link juice on outgoing links of minimal quality. You can prevent that by adding nofollow to the links. Good examples of links to do this one are links in blog comments and links to social bookmarking website. Nofollow or eliminating these channels more link and PageRank score to your own internal pages.

Consider the pages that are important to have indexed and ranked in search engines, e.g. your content and product pages. Then focus internal linking on those.

Here is a rundown of different sitemap file formats and when to use them for quick indexation of your content.

Google sitemaps / XML sitemaps
“XML sitemaps” were originally invented by Google. Later on more search engines like Yahoo, Bing and Ask followed and together they all created the shared standard XML sitemaps.

Using XML sitemaps allow you to submit your entire website with all its pages to search engines. this will help them index your content faster (in particular if you make sure not to have lots of duplicate content etc.) and getting more of your website pages into search engine result pages. Google has since then introduced some new XML sitemap formats for specific kinds of content. In particular the following deserves special attention:

• News Sitemaps
• Image Sitemaps
• Video Sitemaps
• Mobile Sitemaps

If your website lends itself well to these kinds of content, you should create the necessary sitemaps for optimal exposure in search engines. Here is one sitemap generator tool that can handle all XML sitemap file kinds.

HTML sitemaps:
These are the standard good old way of createing sitemaps. They help:

• Visitors find important pages in your website.
• Give link juice to important pages you search engines to crawl.

Remember that you can create HTML sitemaps in any tool or server code language. The output is what has to be XHTML or HTML. Doing that, both browsers (with real humans behind) and search engine crawlers can read them.

ATOM and RSS Feeds:
For blogs, forums and related kinds of websites, you will also want look into RSS and ATOM feed files. Many search engines and news aggregation services allow you to submit feed files. These will help you get new pages and posts indexed the same way, if not faster, XML sitemaps do.

A new webmaster help forum has just launched. It features some of the people behind wellknown sitemap generator and website analyzer tools.

If you ever have a question or need help finding a solution, just ask now. Quite often you will get an answer within the same day!

Getting indexed and ranked in search engines?

A question you need to ask yourself is if you are distributing internal link juice properly. If you make sure to have link weight flow towards your important pages, you stand a better chance of having search engines index and rank them. This process is also called PageRank Sculpting by many search engine marketers.

PageRank Sculpting explained
Well, the name is relatively simple to understand. PageRank is the name of the algorithm Google uses to calculate importance for pages based on linking across the entire internet. Mind you, PageRank is just one of many algorithms Google use to actually rank your pages in search engine result pages.

However,

Internal links is an important factor for search engine indexing and ranking. If you can improve the Internal linking structure to focus on important pages, it can give you a boost in search engines. This process is commonly referred to as PageRank sculpting by people in the search engine optimization and website marketing industries.

Avoid leaking link juice on low-quality outgoing links. You can prevent that by applying nofollow to such links. This in return distributes more importance to your own pages helping them getting indexed and ranked in search engines.

Here’s an interesting blog post about how to use website analysis software tool to improve internal linking and do PageRank sculpting, a fairly new search engine optimization technique made popular by SEOMoz, Gray Wolf and others:

Are you sure the internal link structure of your website has an optimal flow of link juice towards your important pages? If so, you stand a better chance of having search engines index and rank them. The process of optimizing this part of your website is by most search engine marketers called PageRank Sculpting.

It is well worth the read, and explains various strategies you can use to make sure your internal website linking gives the most link love to your important pages, thus making them more likely in getting indexed and ranked by search engines such as Google. Read the rest about link juice flow now.

Just came by an interesting article that discusses techniques to apply when optimizing ads, page titles etc. for maximum click through rate in organic and paid search. If you are Advertising on either Google, Yahoo or MSN/Live chances are you can get more out of your money.