Lessons in Web Development: Google Site Maps
As a sistah with an interesting in online entrepreneurship, I've spent a great deal of my time trying to figure out how to move up in the google ranks. Though I have a lot of good webpages on my site (www.msoyonline.com) , only a small percentage of my pages are indexed in google. Most of my stuff get's lost in cyber space, because I'm stuck doing the same old things - submitting links to a hundred search engines and sending one or two emails.
My marketing skills are improving, but it's taken alot to teach this old dogs new tricks. Truth be told, my online marketing has improved over the last year. In a few months my web traffic went up 150% because of a renewed committment to research and planning. Google, the big wigs of search engines, is of course on the top of my affiliates list. I've been going in circles trying to figure out how the google machine works, all the while ignoring some of the key strategies I dismiss everyday.
Sitemaps is the biggest key of them all. A sitemap is basically a file that lists all the web pages of your site. Google scans your website as best it can, but having a file that actually tells it where all your files are, is a great help. Moreover, in your site map you include how frequently you update your site, so google knows how often to come back and scan your site again. Best of all it's free. I just finished my site map and I have to say it's quite easy. All you need to do is find a website that will scan your site and create an xml file for you that meets all of google's protocol. Google has a list of such sites, so there is no need to search for them. Once you create a google sitemap account and upload your sitemap, you just have to sit back and let googles robots do the rest. I'm confident my ranking will go up once I put a few more marketing strategies in place.
As for the rest of my black online entrepreneurs out there, don't sleep on the fine details of search engine optimization. Make sure your page tags are straight, your headers look clean, and your on top of the lates SEO Technology. If you can't afford to buy a bunch of books - which I cant, sit in the bookstore, the library, or search the web. Don't just put up a site and hope it get's noticed. It's taken me 5 years to realize that's the stupid way to be seen. If you can learn from my mistake, you save your self a whole lot of wasted time in the game of Online Marketing.
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posted by lhenry @ 10:18 AM
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