How to create a sitemap

How to create a sitemap 

Manually Create SEO Optimized Sitemap

A sitemap of a website is similar to the table of contents of a book.  Sitemaps are important because it guides web surfers to the particular part of the website they have a point of interest in. With it they would save time following links and get right to the point instead.

Sitemaps are also where search engines look at if somebody is looking for a particular keyword or phrase. If you have a site map, you can most likely be searched.

Creating a sitemap, now with software technology surging in, is relatively easier than before.  You need not be a programming guru to be one. All need is a notepad, a program editor, and some patience. Here’s how you do it:

Create the listing on a notepad.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be a notepad. Any word processing program will do. First off, make sure to type in all the parts and pieces of your website. Include all pages and all links you have. Create it as if you listing the contents of your book. Make a draft first. You’re sure no to miss something out this way.

Create a new page for your sitemap.
You can insert the sitemap on your website on one of its pages or you can create an entirely different page for it. Using your notepad, incorporate all tags necessary to it to make another webpage. Open up your website creator program and tag your sitemap using it. If you have created your website on your own, this will be easy for you.

Create a link for the sitemap.
You won’t be able to view the sitemap if you won’t put a link for it, of course. Create the link on the front page of your website so that visitors can view it right away and be directed appropriately.

Check your work.
It is important to validate the functionality of the links you created on the sitemap. Test each and every one in there and if you get an error, be sure to fix it accurately. Run through every single page to make sure that all are accounted for.

Upload your work.
Place the sitemap now on your live browser and double check it. It should function as smoothly as the dry run. Error should be minimal at this stage since you already have verified it locally.

The steps provided herewith is the manual way of creating a sitemap. These days, if you search hard enough on the web, you will find online programs that will do all these work for you. All you have to do it type in the URL or the link of your website and they will create the sitemap with click of a button.

Of course that method is generic. All of you who have created their sitemap that way will have an end product that is all the same, plus there’s that possibility that something else will be inserted in there too. Then again, the process is less taxing and way, way simpler.

But if you want a more personalized output, and you are pretty good with computers and programming yourself, better make one of your own.  And since you made your website anyway, creating sitemap is just like creating any other page on the website. Other than you’ll know for sure the links are accurate, you can organize the links the way you prefer it to be. Major parts of the site are emphasized compared to less significant. This is important especially if you are selling products or offering services online.

Sitemap is vital to a website. People search the web a lot for something. If your website has what that particular person is looking for, and your sitemap reports it, then you have a new customer looking at your items.  Not only that, they will see some other things up for sale that they might be interested in as well.

Sitemaps, be it generated by a program automatically or you made it yourself, presents the same purpose. That is to lead your visitors to where they’re likely headed, and for you to be seen on the World Wide Web through search spiders.  So with these, make sure your website has a sitemap of its own, lest make one.

Online Success Depends On Selecting The Right SEO Firm

SEO

The competition in every field of online marketing has become tougher - thanks to the mushroom growth of websites, crossing one billion already. In this rat-race, how your website can bring forth desired results, unless it is popularized by ethical, meaningful and technology-upgraded Search Engine Optimization efforts?

Talking of SEO techniques and tactics, you must understand that these are frequently changing phenomena. In line with the Algorithm Updates (priority of picking and projecting websites by Search Engine crawlers) the SEO tactics have changed vastly, over the recent years. More clearly, the SEO strategies adopted even by a Top SEO Company, believed to be effective till recently have lost their charm - like stuffing of keywords inside the web-content, mindlessly without context.

With this changed scenario obtaining, to follow proven and successful SEO strategies that can guarantee top-ranking by popular Search Engine Page Results, you have to be even more careful in entrusting the website promotion project, only to professional SEO Specialists.

How to choose the Top SEO Company? Here are some important tips:

1. Define your SEO requirements clearly:

The objective of every website floated online is to meet with success - either highest profit or growth for online businesses or immense popularity for service-oriented sites. This is achieved only according to the aspirations of the site owners. i-e , as the owner, you may need to achieve reasonable increase in volume of business in the next 3 months - this may be quantified in percentage. Some other website owner can desire differently , in different volume.

If only you are determined of the target in your mind thus, prior to allotting the SEO task to the SEO Services Company, you can measure the success rate after end of this period, once the SEO Services Company finishes its SEO efforts.

2. Get a Comprehensive Service provider for SEO:

As mentioned earlier, SEO Services of today have become complex. Search Engines stipulate stiffer conditions for ranking a site at the top, as a measure of eliminating substandard sites and preventing them from getting the top-ranks, by illicit methods. The SEO Company you select should be the one that can render comprehensive services, relating to SEO from "A" to "Z".

For example, a result-oriented SEO Company, that has credible track records in SEO tactics should start with complete analysis of your website, including web design, to find out where it stands Search Engine ranking-wise, and suggest to you fruitful corrective methods.

In addition, today's SEO firms are to run that extra-mile, in not only bringing forth huge visitor-traffic to your site, but also prune your website's content suitably. This pruning will help to provide happy consumer-experience, to convert visitors into buyers, then loyal customers and later on canvassing agents by the usefulness of your website, to their friends.

3. Keep your search wider:

It is your website that is going to suffer by selecting a so-so SEO firm. Therefore, you have every liberty to widen your dragnet and take free-consultation offered by multiple SEO Companies, to come to informed decision. Gathering as much details as possible with regard to their services, capabilities, track-records and of course the cost involved will put you in a better standing, in implementing your choice.

Check the credentials of the Top SEO Company carefully given from websites of your size, field and industry. If those sites have been promoted into prominence by the SEO Company in question, you can be sure that the SEO Company has the required capabilities to promote your site also very well.

4. See only the merit and not size:

It is not necessary that the so-called big names of SEO companies can  deliver results. Irrespective of the size, the professionalism of the SEO specialists is all that is going to achieve your objective. So be smart and select your right SEO Company (which must invariably be the Top SEO Company) that can work according to your wishes, aspirations and budget, to be a happy winner of online success.