Website Design 101 - How to Build a Sitemap

What is the biggest mistake anyone planning a website creation or redesign could make?

Answer: Not thoroughly planning out your website beforehand is an expensive disaster waiting to happen, even when you are using great CMS technology.

A sitemap is a structured list of all pages within a website. It is the table of contents for your web presence and is crucial both during the planning phase of a website and for the end user experience. The sitemap foundation becomes the page navigation that dictates the user experience. If your content is not organized in a clear and standardized way, the user will leave your site frustrated and uninterested in your brand.

Often, a sitemap is completely separate from the look and feel of a business website. So, while the sitemap is a critical starting place to get you thinking about your web project, it doesn't dictate that your site will be "boring". On the flip side, a website that is graphically appealing or full of pizazz may still come off as a smoke and mirrors magic trick if the user does not know what information is available or how to find what they are looking for.

Visualization as an important web design tool.

A sitemap can be viewed in two ways:

1. A list format - this is like a table of contents in a book.

Think text book: the information is grouped by chapter and each chapter has a few subsections. In the web world, we call the chapters and the sections

2. A graphical map format - this is more like a mind map.

Surprising, this can be dangerous. It looks great to present the end user with a visual map of your website, but during the planning phase of a website, it might become too easy to leave areas of your map too vague or to navigate a user through a series of pages without providing them a link to main content.

Users love a new and engaging experience, but from the business world they expect a few constants:

• An About Us page: This should always be near a top-level page if not a superpage. It can be named something more clever as long as users will understand that the page is about your company.
• At least one top-level superpage devoted to your company's products or services.
• A Contact Us page: Many times, users only go to your website to get up-to-date contact information. Remember, younger people are much less likely to use a phone book. Make this easy: don't put up walls around the information your readers are looking for.

XML Sitemap Is an important part of Search Optimization.

Search engines have become increasingly good at recognizing legitimate businesses verses imitators by viewing a website's sitemap and analyzing the content of each page. A well-structured site means that when a user searches for your company name, or related products and services in your area in order to buy and submitting orders for a specific product, your website is more likely to rank highly.

In fact, depending on your market, your Homepage, About Us, and Contact Us might all be listed in a search engine result so that users have one-click access to these key pages.

Should a sitemap be created just once?

Sitemaps are crucial when planning a website, but they do not have to be set in stone. One important aspect of a content management system is the ability to grow your website over time. This means that as a company expands and adds a service or adds a second type of service or product, corresponding pages can easily be added to the website and and the content modified appropriately:

• Home
• About Us
Our History
• Our Staff
• Our Services

• Service A
• Type I
• Type II

• Service B
• Service C
• Get A Quote

• Submit Your Order
• Latest News
• Contact Us

If a site has been structured correctly, search engines will pick-up on the addition and re-index your site accordingly. One last important step in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the existence of a properly formatted.XML sitemap that lives off-menu in the root directory of your website hosting server.

It is a complicated array of URL's and priorities, where super pages are given top priority and blog posts are given lower priority, which tells search engines to list your Homepage, About Us, and Contact Us pages first in their search listings.

Because this is one thing all the major search engines agree upon, there is a standard protocol for generating and submitting these links, so there are several programs that can automatically update and submit a properly formatted XML sitemap.

A Few Simple Sitemap Tips

• When building a sitemap, start with a structure that is unlikely to change, but that will allow room for growth.
• Do not get in the habit of changing top-level pages, as Search Engines will take note and assume your content is unreliable and rank your website - and thus your digital presence - poorly.
• The sitemap can contain sections, for example, adding a top-level page call Blog or Recent News is understood as meaning that articles will be posted and displayed in that section.
• Every user experiences your site differently. Some may like your menu navigation and the way it reflects the organization of your content; however some people may prefer a simple organized list posted somewhere off-menu (see resource box)

Richard Royal is Web Developer for Steele Agency, Inc based in Rome, Georgia.

Richard is a Roman native and Berry College Physics graduate who is applying his software engineering skills at Steele Agency. He provides the ability to develop dynamic web pages and applications, and is highly experienced with Linux based operating systems and a wide range of computer programming languages and platforms.

Although he is well educated in complex problem solving and mathematical analysis, and currently finishing a second degree in Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech, he considers much of his technical expertise to stem from his hobbies such as building amateur electronics, star gazing, and studying old Star Trek episodes.

XML sitemap: http://www.steele-agency.com/sitemap.xml
Simple off-menu sitemap: http://www.steele-agency.com/about-us/sitemap/

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Web Traffic Estimates And How To Bring In More Visitors For Free

If you are not signed up with Google Analytics, then you cannot possibly be taking the web traffic, and the future of, your business seriously. This service tells you everything that you need to know concerning who is visiting, how long they are staying, and what pages they value the most. From there, you can come to a clear estimation of how many web hits you are getting per day, and what you can do to improve those statistics over the long term. Bringing in visitors is not the only part that you need to focus on, however. Once they are there, you need to learn how to keep them. Both of these needs tie in together in a manner that you are about to see.

First of all, where do you find new people to visit your site? You can start with social networking sites. The algorithms developed by sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Google-Plus will give you the opportunity to learn who your visitors are, or at least who they should be. By marketing to people, who are in your niche, you stand a better chance of getting more eyeballs more often. Aside from this method, you should also be utilizing proper Google site mapping and search engine optimization. In essence, you must make it easy for as many people to find you as possible. From there, you are able to develop the fastest, most hands free and surefire way to get more and more traffic: word of mouth.

Word of mouth marketing is still the most effective form of marketing. Instead of casting a net and trying to land 10,000 new visitors in one fell swoop, you need to be more concerned about developing deeper relationships with the people, who are already at your website. How do you do that? By giving them quality content, answering questions they leave, and responding to comments. Building a sense of community with the people, who are already there is important because 250 devoted followers can bring you thousands upon thousands of new visitors, and the only thing that it costs you is time.

Well, time and sincerity. You have to be genuine with the people that are visiting your site. If you are disingenuous, they will see through it, and not only will you not get new traffic, you will lose what you already have. Valuing the people, who have found you and continue to come back to you by giving them a sense of community and a deeper sense of involvement is how you market effectively. Once you roll that snowball to the top of the hill, it will take off on its own, and you won't feel so compelled to be "on" all the time.

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Link Building Techniques That Improve Site Traffic And Search Engine Rankings

If you want to make your website a success online, one of the first things you should equip yourself with is enough knowledge about link building techniques - a very important part of search engine optimization.

Link building is among the most effective SEO practices used by most successful individuals in the industry. If you haven't tried this tactic yet, you are at the right place. We are here to provide you with proven and reliable link building services that will help you get the most out of the different search engines around.

Aside from unfailing services, we are also more than willing to provide you with credible information on how search engine works. This is because we fully understand how important it is for people like you to know the basics of SEO.

The moment you entered a search query into the search engine, the algorithm applies some rules to determine the pages that are most related to your search. The results are based on the text content of the page as well as its context, indicated by the links it received from other sites and web pages. This means that inbound links basically serve as votes or points to your site.

While there are lots of ways to do link building, not all of them are effective. So you have to be very careful in choosing the one that you should use for your site. If you aren't familiar with the present link building practices, you better leave it to the pro. Some of the proven link building techniques that you can use are:

News and Article Submission

What's good about reliable article submission and news submission sites? Their news and article pages usually rank higher and they send in big amount of qualified traffics. So aside from the inbound links your website is getting from them, you can also have a good stream of traffic clicking through your site. It is, hence, recommended that you write an article regularly and submit it to article directories.

Link Exchange

This is a good strategy but must be done carefully. Don't ever make the mistake of exchanging links with a wrong site or else, you can get banned from Google. Be very choosy when it comes to the sites you should exchange links with.

Forums

Majority of online forums allow their members to use personal profile links or signature links. If you want other forum members to click through your links, be able to make quality contributions to the forum.

Blog comments

Blog commenting is also among the popular link building techniques used by many Internet entrepreneurs. All you need to do here is to look for blog posts related to your site and post your comments, along with a link back to your site.

Link Baiting

This is where the importance of quality content comes in. If your content is entertaining or interesting enough, people will sure want to link to it, thereby increasing your inbound links and improving your place in the results pages of various search engines.

Link Directories

Though they are not as efficient as before, links coming from some directories are still of good quality and are cost-effective. Not all directories, however, are made equal but there are still few that are worth submitting to. It's good if you'll be able to find out which directories are good and which are not.

From an SEO point of view, your goal should be to get quality inbound or one-way text links from relevant sites and topics. The above mentioned link building techniques are among the methods we use to help our customers achieve their goals of improving their site's traffic and search engine rankings. We would be happy and more than willing to help you do the same to your site too.

For link building services in Canada, a Toronto SEO services provider can help you with your goal. Though there are other search engine providers around Canada, many Toronto SEO [http://seolinkbuildingteam.net] professionals have both local, national as well as global experience in search marketing.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Anette_Soriano

How to Optimize Your Website

When you have a website that you are using for a business it is important for that site to be found within the search engines. It can be difficult to compete with so many other websites on the internet so optimizing your website in order for it to get brought to the top of the search results is a necessity. You may be wondering how, exactly, does that task get accomplished. It does not have to be complicated, but knowing a little bit of html is required.

When viewing the html code of your website it looks like a bunch of mumbo jumbo at first, but when you learn what the different symbols stand for it makes it a lot easier. All the tags start with

<tag> and end with </tag> So, for the title of your website it would look like this <title>Title Goes Here</title> When choosing your title you want it to have the keywords you want to optimize your website for. Choose keywords that are longer and not too competitive.

You can use tools like Overture or Word Tracker to choose your keywords. These tools will tell you how competitive your chosen keywords are and how many times they are searched for each month. Take the keywords you chose and place them in the title, h1, h2, alt, and meta keyword tags. Sprinkle those keywords throughout the body of your website making sure they are at the beginning and end.

Try to keep the menu on the right side of the page. Search engines read a website from the right down, center down then left down. You want the majority of your keywords in the body of the website not the menu, Keep the density of your keywords between 2%-6% for maximum benefit. You can check this with a keyword density tool on the web. Just do a search and it will come up.

The alt attributes are within the image tag. When you put a keyword within these attributes it will show on the webpage when the cursor is hovering over that image. Using your keywords in some of the text links on your website will also help the optimization of your website.

Some basic html knowledge is needed when optimizing a website but there are plenty of places on the internet where you can learn the basics. Doing the things described in this article will give you the best chance of getting to the top of the search engines. This helps bring targeted visitors to your website and eventually sales for your business.

When you get the hang of all this you can add other keywords to your site and start ranking high in the search engines for those terms as well. It takes time to learn and it takes time to rank highly for your chosen keywords but it is possible to do without having to be too difficult.

Tara Martindale specializes in helping people find the best work at home business opportunities available. Visit Tara's Work at Home Business Opportunities site for details.

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Basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips for Better Traffic!

Need more traffic to your website? Some simple search engine optimization (SEO) techniques could bring you considerably more traffic with very little effort. You have to work smart and hard when it comes to the marketing platform techniques you use for your home-based business.

First of all, make sure Google and the search engines can figure out what your site is about. You do this in a number of ways. Primarily, make sure your site content is coded in a format that Google can actually read and will index: HTML. Google cannot reliably read text rendered in graphics such as Flash. Use alternate text to describe the photos or images on your site.

Make sure your most important keywords appear in your title tags

And, when you're writing content for your site, cover your topic completely without "stuffing" keywords into it. Getting human visitors to your website is your goal, so make sure they find the information they are looking for, and deliver it to them in a readable manner.

See that your keyword appears a few times in your content, especially in your headings. You can use bold and italic fonts to emphasize important words and phrases.

Focus on writing good content. When you focus on the reader and not a search engine, you will naturally use synonyms and related terms in addition to your keywords. Google will reward you for this with higher rankings in the search results, which means more traffic for you.

Cover your topic completely. Write as much about it as you can, as longer content is usually preferred. However, don't drone on or repeat yourself if you've run out of things to say. Remember that human visitors are the ones you want to keep - don't drive them away with poor quality or repetitive content.

But Wait, There's More

Make sure to link your content to other related content on your site, and when you do, make your keywords and variations the anchor text of your links. Review your site to see that it is easily navigable by both humans and search engine spiders. Creating and submitting to the search engines a file called a "sitemap" is an excellent way to show all your pages to Google and the other engines so they won't overlook any of your content.

Once you have created a site rich with content that search engines can read easily and that delivers value to your site visitors, it's time to start promoting your site by building links to it from other sites.

A few easy ways to get quality links to your site are to create blogs, write press releases, submit articles to directories, and write comments on forums and blogs.

These are but a few basic SEO tips to help you get free web traffic to your website. We want you to Learn to Earn and of course, learn to Play Your Best Game, too.

Alex Singletary has seen that money can be the greatest obstacle in people's path to an abundant life and is driven to help others overcome their circumstances. His knowledge and passion pertaining to this subject was ignited by attending his first financial wealth conference at the age of 14. Alex knows first-hand that great things happen when the intention is in the right place and the desire is great enough. Let Alex show you how to play your best game, visit: http://play-your-best-game.blogspot.com/

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Role Of Domain Name In Web Business!

When the business world get global and the technology become hi-tech, internet users are increased and hence internet presence becomes essential for any business. Internet marketing plays an important role to grow any business in the global market. All businessmen give more importance to their trademark and trades instead of domain names in their business. They are more involved in dealing trademarks of their products but the business in internet world deals more with domain names.

A domain name plays a major role in flourishing the business and exposing the products to more and more customers. But still the domain names are neglected by businessman. They still treat the internet role insignificant in their business. They are not aware of the importance of domain name and hence it becomes the minor issue for the business. Special techniques and funds are invested to protect the trade names but no value is given to domain names.

With registration of trademarks, the domain of any business, whether big or small, should also be registered. Neglecting it can be costly in future terms to any business. Some legal companies now recognize this important issue and started advising their customers in this regard. Many smaller businesses do however not realize these facts and should wake up to reality. Many smaller businesses can grow into bigger enterprises over time after giving proper value to their domain names.

Neglecting the domain names a business may end up spending huge amounts on legal costs to protect their interests. Domain name is like a brand in web marketing. Hence the name must be catchy and should represent you and your products appropriately. This is the name through which your business is known over net. This is the word by which your business and your website will be known in the internet marketing. Hence the Key words should be choose from the niche. It should be a unique name. It should be sensible and easy to remember.

These tips will also help you with better search engine placement since a domain name that contains key words related to your product or service will ultimately place better than one that doesn't.

Having an own domain name is the first step to make money online. Your customers will feel more comfortable buying whatever it is that you are selling if you have your own domain name. It makes this will give an image of a trustworthy company rather than with some fly by night operator.

Having a Domain name is the way to success of an online entity. This will create a first impression of your business. You should always aim for the dotcom version of a name, that's what most people will go to after doing a search or after typing something directly into their address bar. You're likely to have more traffic to your website with your own domain name because more people will be returning as they can remember your address and because many search directories such as Yahoo only index websites with their own domain name.

An own domain name means that the address of the web site will be of the form http://www.yourcompany.com. Definitely it sounds more professional and reliable too than hosting some other free sites for the company like

[http://www.somefreewebsite.com/yoursitename]

In short domain names are essential factor to be considered to protect their rights in a world where Internet marketing and web business increase on a daily basis.

REPRINT RIGHTS statement: This article is free for republishing by visitors provided the Author Bio box is retained as usual so that all links are Active/Linkable with no syntax changes.

Author Alok Vats is associated with many SEO activities at AN Info Solutions. They deal with Search Engine Optimization and content management activities.

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Generate Website Traffic Quickly And Affordably

Are you getting frustrated that the only visitors to your websites are your mother and your friends? Then you are probably not putting enough efforts to generate website traffic. Website building doesn't stop at designing a site and publishing great content on it. You also have to consistently drive traffic towards it. Here are a few tips that can help you get the traffic you want.

1. Write articles not to be published on your website but to be submitted to online article directories. This is called article marketing. There are a lot of advantages to using this technique. It does not only drive traffic to your website, it boosts its search engine rankings as well and builds your authority on your niche. Submitting to these directories is often free so you have nothing to lose in trying them.

2. Get into link exchange agreements with other website owners. Make it sure though that you are link exchanging with a website whose topics are related to yours. In this way, you complement each others content. The benefits of a link exchange are several. First, it drives traffic. Second, it passes link juice. And third, it makes your website look more relevant in the eyes of search engines like Google.

3. Submit your website to directories. This is even more important if your website is a blog. There are a lot of respected blog directories out there to which you can submit your blog. Some charges a fee before they include your blog in their listing but most of these directories are free.

4. Have your website optimized for the search engines. Search engine traffic or organic traffic still is the best source of traffic out there. If you do not know how to implement SEO, then find someone who does. What matters most is that you get your website easily found when people search on the engines like Google and Yahoo. Search engines are the best places to generate website traffic.

Social networking sites are now all the rage in the internet. Facebook just recently announced that their registered members are now over 500 million. Other social sites like Twitter, Foursquare and Gowalla are also enjoying rapid growth. What these mean is that there are millions of people logging in to these social networking sites every single day. Looking at it on a marketer's view, these sites are gold mines. If you are able to tap these markets and use them to drive visitors to your website or blog, you increase your site's chances of being successful by a huge leap.

Here are a few tricks on how to use social networking sites to generate website traffic.

First, choose the social networking sites that are most appropriate to the type of website you have. Just because everyone is using Twitter does not necessarily mean you will have to use it as well. Before you sign up with any networking site, you have to ask yourself the question: "What can this site do for me, my website or my business?" If you can't seem to get any solid answer to the question, then the site is probably not the right fit for your website.

Second, sign up with just a few networking sites if free time is something you do not have. If you sign up with too many sites but you don't regularly participate in such sites, all your efforts will be wasted. Hence, focus on a few social sites that you know you can spend some time on.

Third, the key to an effective social media marketing strategy is genuine participation. Don't use a social site just to generate website traffic. You have to use it the way it's supposed to be used first. Use it as a marketing tool second. So build those connections and trust before you even think of doing a sales pitch.

One of the fastest and most effective ways to generate website traffic is through dropping comments on other websites and blogs. This is especially important if you are just starting out as a site builder and blogger. The efforts in traffic-building are at its hardest during the first weeks and months of creating a website or blog. Commenting in other sites is one way to get the ball rolling.

There are however a lot of factors that you need to take into consideration before you write your very first comment. Just like any marketing technique, commenting requires planning. You can't just go around the internet dropping comments on every comment box that comes your way. This is not the right and effective way to do it.

Look first at your own website and determine what your main topics and themes are. This is very important because your comments will be much more effective if you leave comments on websites and blogs whose contents are related to what your own website has. The general rule here is that as much as possible, comment only on those sites that are on the same niche as yours. This doesn't mean you can't comment on unrelated sites; but you have to keep it to a minimum.

The key to an effective commenting strategy is the value of your comments. If your comments are composed of just "Nice post.", then you are not doing yourself any good. Don't comment just for the sake of commenting. See to it that the comments you leave provides value or meaning to what's already been discussed on the article you are commenting on.

While commenting, it is best that you use your real name or that of your website to give more credibility to your comments. Readers of your comments will more likely click on your name thus helping to generate website traffic in the process.

The success of a certain website is often measured by how much web traffic it generates. The more daily visitors it receives, the more successful it will be deemed. Your website may have the best content in its niche but if nobody visits to read it then that content amounts to nothing. As a webmaster or blogger, it is therefore a necessity that you spend some effort in traffic generation. Traffic-building can be very time-consuming most especially if you don't have the monetary budget to take advantage of automated marketing techniques. Internet people are a tough crowd to market to. They are not that easy to please. Their attention spans are very limited. In fact, various studies have shown that you only have just a few seconds to capture the interest of an online surfer.

It is best to look at your traffic-building efforts as a sales pitch. Your website and its content are your products. You are offering it out there in exchange for people's attention. What catches the attention of people these days are content that's straight to the point, helpful and entertaining. The two most common reasons why people go online is to be entertained and to get or gather data. If you can provide these to them, it is going to be much simpler building your site's traffic.

There are a lot of methods you can use for traffic generation. These include search engine optimization, blogging, article marketing, social media marketing, video marketing, PLR marketing, viral marketing and a whole bunch of other ways. You don't have to use all of them. Just pick those that you are comfortable with and of course those that suits the theme or niche of your website. Some traffic-building strategies work on some niches but are not that effective on other niches. So choose your strategies very well.

In order for a website to be successful and achieve its goals, it must have an established reader base. In the simplest of terms, it has to have some traffic. The products and services you have won't sell or the ideas you wrote won't be read if your website doesn't receive substantial traffic. Below are 3 ways that you can utilize to generate web traffic towards your site.

1. Search engine optimization - You have to make sure that your site is optimized for the search engines. Make it as easy for them to crawl and index your site. Create a sitemap for it. Make it uncluttered and navigable. And research very well your most important keywords or phrases and see to it that such keywords are used in all of your site's pages. If you do not know search engine optimization, then you either start learning it or get someone who knows to help you out. SEO is not as complicated as it sounds. Just a few hours of reading SEO resources can easily teach you the basics of it.

2. Social media marketing - Millions of people log-in to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter every day. This fact alone should be enough reason for you to start social media marketing. All you have to do is create profiles for you and your website then start connecting to people. Build trust and connection first before you start pitching them your stuff.

3. Article marketing - This is pretty simple to implement though it can be very time-consuming since you will be writing articles majority of the time. What you do is write articles that are related to the theme of your website. Include in each article a short author bio as well as a link towards your website. After that, just submit it to article directories like EzineArticles.

Follow these 3 ways to generate web traffic and it won't be long before visitors start streaming in towards your website.

What good is a well-designed and content-rich website if nobody knows it exists? Here are some very practical and effective ways on how to generate website traffic.

1. Search engine optimization - This should be the very first thing you have to be doing once your website or blog is live on the internet. SEO is not as complicated as it may sound. All it entails is basically using keywords in your content and making sure that the website can be easily crawled and indexed by search engines. Put in there some link-building tactics and you are good to go.
2. Social media marketing - Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are the hottest web properties right now. If you are not using them, then you are being left behind. But if you do, use them to drive traffic to your website as well. It's just a matter of posting links to your website on your Facebook wall or tweeting it on your Twitter page. Or you can create a Facebook Fan Page for your website. So if someone finds it interesting, he can just "Like" it. If he does, it will be posted on his wall and imagine if he has a thousand friends. That could be a thousand new visitors to your website.
3. Article marketing - This strategy may not be as effective as it used to be but it's still a great way to drive traffic, boost search engine rankings and build authority. What you need to do is simply write an article and submit to as many article directories as possible.

Buy advertising space - Sometimes, the most effective way to generate website traffic is by spending money on great ad spaces. Make sure though that the sites where you advertise yourself are on the same niche as yours. You cannot for instance advertise your online meat store on a vegan website.

If you want to learn how to Generate Website Traffic then visit http://total-traffic-domination.com

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