• 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.

• Are you a local business owner? Join a local business forum or community.
• Are you are a website owner? Join a forum for webmasters.
• You can probably see where we are going…

When you have a business, even if just a hobby website you wish to grow, you should always try to network with people!

Whenever you join forum that somehow relates to business, you tap into a major resource of people who have experienced things first hand. Large part of running a business these days include running a website. Thus in addition to joining and networking in various business owner forums, you should also be joining various forums for webmasters to learn more about marketing and conversion.

When searching for relevant business and website related forums, it is a good idea to find both some local ones and global ones. It is often easier to get through in local markets which is why you should not leave this out, even if aiming for the global market within your niche.

If you are a website owner, here are some relevant webmaster forums to get you started: highrankings.com/forum, forums.DigitalPoint.com, WebHelpForums.com, forums.SEOChat.com and SitePoint.com/forums.

If you are a business owner as well, please notice that many of the above listed forums are also visited by business owners who can help you out with general business decisions, e.g. out-sourcing. However, for all sorts of tax, accounting etc. issues you should really find a local community to join, offline or online!

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.

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!

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 our tool for analyzing internal linking (and a whole slew of other issues).

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. (And not on e.g. low quality filler pages of various sorts.)

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. For this you can for instance use Microsys Sitemapper (ours) as it can handle all XML sitemap file kinds. Fore more alternatives, search Google

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 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.

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.

Researching Which Keywords Are Searched Often
Advertising platforms such as Google Adwords and Microsoft adCenter are not limited to to merely help you with which titles may get the highest CTR, you can also use them to research which words and phrases people search for. That is immensely useful as well when it comes to SEO