Professional Web Design Tips for a Faster Website

In today's time-crunched world, most people literally don't have a minute to spare. This hurried pace extends to the realm of website design -- your professional Web design must satisfy the demands of users with a wide range of options for viewing the Web.

Even if you create a website design that's worth a wait, visitors faced with slow download speed aren't likely to stick around. So how can you make sure that time is on your side? Pay close attention to seven professional Web design tips to create a website that won't slow your business down.

Limit use of flash

Flash is a classic example of style over substance and, while it definitely has its place in professional Web design, it must be used sparingly when you create a website. Even if your visitors have the right flash player (and many won't), it will increase your site's download time. Flash is also one of the Web site design elements that is not yet accessible to search engines, which means it can only hinder your search engine optimization efforts.

Compress your images

Images are a great example of how looks can be deceiving in professional Web design. You might not realize just how much space they occupy when you create a website design. By compressing your images before adding them to your professional Web design, you can reduce/shrink a GIF or .JPEG image by up to half its original size. You may also want to specify the height and weight of your images in your HTML, which can decrease loading time.

Clean up your code

While HTML text is much faster than graphic text, there are ways you can make it even faster. Watch out for extraneous HTML coding – like spaces, unnecessary tags and even white space -- that can increase the size of your files. Remember that less is more, and use defaults for tags or remove them wherever possible.

Use thumbnails

Thumbnails are an especially helpful website design technique for ecommerce websites. Provide customers with a small, fast-loading image of your product and let them decide whether they want to view the larger version of the image.

Switch to CSS

Many Web designers now use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) instead of the more traditional table layout. CSS is a styling language that has a dual purpose in professional Web design: it can save you time when you create a website and save your visitors time by drastically reducing page size and download time.

Reduce server requests

Any element of your design that loads from a different server – whether it be a graphic, an audio clip, or an ad – will elicit an HTTP request each time the page loads. Create a website with limited external content to reduce loading time.

Pay attention to page size

Even if you use all of the tips above, your page size may still be big enough to cause a slow response when all the pieces of your website are put together. Remember that less is often more in professional Web design, and use only the content that is absolutely necessary. Ideal page size is around 30KB.

When you create a website design for your business, go the extra mile to ensure your website has the speed your visitors need -- or risk getting passed by.

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What is Ecommerce - an overview ?

In its simplest form ecommerce is the buying and selling of products and services by businesses or consumers over the World Wide Web.

Often referred to as simply ecommerce (or e-commerce) the phrase is used to describe business that is conducted over the Internet using any of the applications that rely on the Internet, such as e-mail, instant messaging, shopping carts, Web services, UDDI, FTP, and EDI, among others. Electronic commerce can be between two businesses transmitting funds, goods, services and/or data or between a business and a customer.

People use the term "ecommerce" or "online shopping" to describe the process of searching for and selecting products in online catalogues and then "checking out" using a credit card and encrypted payment processing. Internet sales are increasing rapidly as consumers take advantage of

lower prices offered by vendors operating with less margin than a bricks and mortar store

greater convenience of having a product delivered rather than the cost of time and transport and parking of going to a store

sourcing product more cheaply from overseas vendors

great variety and inventory offered by online stores

comparison engines that compare and recommend product

auction sites, where they did for goods

Electronic commerce or ecommerce is a term for any type of business, or commercial transaction, that involves the transfer of information across the Internet. It covers a range of different types of businesses, from consumer based retail sites, through auction or music sites, to business exchanges trading goods and services between corporations. It is currently one of the most important aspects of the Internet to emerge.

Ecommerce allows consumers to electronically exchange goods and services with no barriers of time or distance. Electronic commerce has expanded rapidly over the past five years and is predicted to continue at this rate, or even accelerate. In the near future the boundaries between "conventional" and "electronic" commerce will become increasingly blurred as more and more businesses move sections of their operations onto the Internet.

Business to Business or B2B refers to electronic commerce between businesses rather than between a business and a consumer. B2B businesses often deal with hundreds or even thousands of other businesses, either as customers or suppliers. Carrying out these transactions electronically provides vast competitive advantages over traditional methods. When implemented properly, ecommerce is often faster, cheaper and more convenient than the traditional methods of bartering goods and services.

Electronic transactions have been around for quite some time in the form of Electronic Data Interchange or EDI. EDI requires each supplier and customer to set up a dedicated data link (between them), where ecommerce provides a cost-effective method for companies to set up multiple, ad-hoc links. Electronic commerce has also led to the development of electronic marketplaces where suppliers and potential customers are brought together to conduct mutually beneficial trade.

The road to creating a successful online store can be a difficult if unaware of ecommerce principles and what ecommerce is supposed to do for your online business. Researching and understanding the guidelines required to properly implement an e-business plan is a crucial part to becoming successful with online store building.

What do you need to have an online store and what exactly is a shopping cart?

Shopping cart software is an operating system used to allow consumers to purchase goods and or services, track customers, and tie together all aspects of ecommerce into one cohesive whole.

While there are many types of software that you can use, customizable, turnkey solutions are proven to be a cost effective method to build, edit and maintain an online store. How do online shopping carts differ from those found in a grocery store? The image is one of an invisible shopping cart. You enter an online store, see a product that fulfills your demand and you place it into your virtual shopping basket. When you are through browsing, you click checkout and complete the transaction by providing payment information.

To start an online business it is best to find a niche product that consumers have difficulty finding in malls or department stores. Also take shipping into consideration. Pets.com found out the hard way: dog food is expensive to ship FedEx! Then you need an ecommerce enabled website. This can either be a new site developed from scratch, or an existing site to which you can add ecommerce shopping cart capabilities.

The next step, you need a means of accepting online payments. This usually entails obtaining a merchant account and accepting credit cards through an online payment gateway (some smaller sites stick with simpler methods of accepting payments such as PayPal).

Lastly, you need a marketing strategy for driving targeted traffic to your site and a means of enticing repeat customers. If you are new to ecommerce keep things simple- know your limitations.

Ecommerce can be a very rewarding venture, but you cannot make money overnight. It is important to do a lot of research, ask questions, work hard and make on business decisions on facts learned from researching ecommerce. Don't rely on "gut" feelings. We hope our online ecommerce tutorial has helped your business make a better decision in choosing an online shopping cart for your ecommerce store.

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Important SEO Tips For Your Website

Search Engine Optimization, SEO is a process that looks after improving any website ranking on the SERPs in order to get traffic naturally or organically. Google search engine has become smart and intelligent these days. It has started penalizing sites for using unfair means to increase their website ranking in the search engine.

SEO, on the other hand, uses simple process and helps such kind of people develop and expand their business genuinely in a proper way. We are here with the 5 best SEO tips that would surely improve your website ranking in the search engine.

Writing quality Content

Content forms the base of your website ranking. Whenever any searcher looks for any kind of information, he or she will type keywords in the search column and the search engine will display the results matching those keywords. Your content should not only be good but presented in a way that easily attracts the audience. SEO guide you in this direction.

Make it simple, easily understandable, knowledgeable enough to do some value addition to the reader. He or she should feel delighted once your content reading is finished. Fresh and 100% plagiarism free content is always welcomed. Once you are able to get the trust of clients via your content, half of your marketing job is already done.

Social Media

Social Media is an amazing platform to promote your business, website, its products, and services to the people in masses. This Social media platform should never be ignored. Once you have created an interesting content, share it on social networking sites like Facebook Twitter, LinkedIn and engage more people so that it automatically gets recognized by the Google search engine. This is the main reasons why most people advise beginners to use this platform and share as many posts as they can.

Right Keywords infusion at a right place

The first step of this tip is to choose the right sets of keywords that can drive the organic traffic to your website. You can use keyword research tool to get an idea of how people search on the Internet.

Analyze which sets of keywords are in demand and then use the same in context to your content. Then make sure, you don’t stuff your content unnecessarily with the keywords. Keyword density should be 2-3% only.

Regularly check the website Performance:

Use tools like Google Analytics to track your website performance on a regular basis. Create a list of customers who are interacting with your website and answer the queries that pop up in their minds. Reviews and feedbacks from readers are very important to improve and make your site better than ever.

Have User-Friendly Navigation

While this won’t only make your visitors happy, it will make Google happy as well. You might have the best content in the world, but if your visitors can’t locate it on your site – it won’t matter. Make sure your navigation stays consistent and concise across all pages of your site. Try to narrow down your navigation to no more than 7 options. Dropdown menus are fine to better organize content and offer visitors additional browsing options, just ensure it makes sense to your target demographic.

Utilize Social Media

Google wants to see more than just a company website. They want to see social media profiles, reviews, and an active community or following for your brand. The more content you have supporting your brand online – the better your rankings will be with Google.

Create Quality Content

First and foremost, write quality and informative content for your website visitors. Try not to focus on page length. If your page has 200 or 700 words on it, that’s totally fine. Generally, we recommend to our clients that you have at least 200 words on a page, and that you make sure your content is focused around just one topic (which would be your keyword or keyphrase). It’s fine to have a page that is 205 words and then another that may be more detailed and exceed 1,000 – as long as your content is informative, easy-to-read, focused and well-structured – the length of a page isn’t a big factor.

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Free Google SEO Tools Everyone Should Use

Whether you are a beginner or any professional of any online business, you must have come across a need for Google SEO tools to keep running your website smoothly in order to get a higher ranking. If yes, we are here with the list of Top 10 tools that are free to use and definitely brings the desired results:

Google Search Console

If you only make use of one tool from this list, Google Search Console (formally known as Webmaster Tools) is the plum choice. Just as the logo demonstrates it’s intent with a spanner, using Search Console is akin to giving your site a regular service; use it to keep everything running smoothly, and spot bigger issues quickly.

Find out if your site has a manual penalty, identify crawling issues and broken links, see how many pages are indexed, download links, test your robots.txt file or structured data, and plenty more, all for free. It’s a peek into how Google regards elements of your site.

Oh, and while you’re at it, check out Bing Webmaster Tools; as Sam points out, there’s lots to be gained from this free tool as well!

Google Analytics

Ok, we all know about the frustration of (not provided) keyword data, taking away some of our most helpful analysis. But, there’s still a HUGE advantage is having analytics data for your site in order to analyse content, user experience, the success of campaigns and more. In fact, if you’re not using analytics in your digital marketing, you’re behind the competition, no matter what.

Google Analytics remains a popular, and constantly evolving tool, though there is increasing competition from alternatives such as Clicky, Open Web Analytics, WebTrends, Omniture and more. Want some extra help? Check out the Solutions Gallery for great ways to slice your data, and the URL builder to add custom tracking to your links.

Google Adwords Keyword Planner

Another tool that’s been through significant, and often much-lamented, change in the last year, the Adwords Keyword Planner remains the de-facto source for many when it comes to ascertaining keyword volumes (though don’t rely on it for exact numbers), even if other tools are used for generating seed lists.

It feels that the new Planner is much more PPC focussed than the Keyword Tool it superseded, and the suggested keywords are often so broad as to be useless initially. However, there are ways to still use the Keyword Planner to get excellent data.

Google Trends

Google Trends is still a great tool for comparing traffic for different search terms, including historic, geographic and related terms (in Google’s mind) data. Understanding if a term is a rising or falling element of your topic’s vocabulary is highly valuable for creating enticing content, and available for free.

Google Consumer Surveys

We all know that understanding our audience is key to making a great website that serves their needs. Whilst surveys can cost a lot of money, Google’s Consumer Surveys have a free option for measuring site satisfaction – you can’t deviate from the four default questions without paying, but you can still get valuable data on how users perceive your site and their experience of it. This can be especially helpful when testing a new site design or content category.

PageSpeed Insights

Google announced that site speed had become a signal in their search ranking algorithms. Subsequent studies have also shown that site speed does have an effect on your site’s visibility.

Fortunately, there is a way to create a list of suggestions for your client or development team without having to be an expert coder (though that never hurts). Google’s PageSpeed Tools includes a PageSpeed Insights broswer extension for Chrome and Firefox (as an extension to Firebug), and an in-browser version that offers even further detail. Either option will give you some actionable data to get your site literally up to speed.

Content Experiments

What was known as Google’s Website Optimizer has evolved into Google Analytics Content Experiments. As the name suggests, it now lives within Google Analytics rather than as a stand-alone product, but still offers an excellent, and free, way to test, measure and optimise your site.

Content Experiments ties in with the goals you have created in Google Analytics, and lets you show several different variations of a page to users. This means you can test layouts, headlines, content, colours and more to find the optimum layout. As conversion rate optimisation becomes a more common part of the digital marketing landscape, this is a great way to dip your toes in the water before making an investment in an agency or ine of the range of potent user testing tools, all while getting actionable results.

Google Places for Business

Want another free method for extra search visibility that’s been shown to generate traffic? Get yourself a local listings result by using Google’s Local facilities, Places for Business and Google+ Local. Multiple tools? Well, yes, somewhat confusingly, there’s two different ways to claim a local presence.

Essentially, your Google Places listing gives you control over the information that is shown in Google’s Maps, which local results make use of. Google+ Business pages look similar, but allow you to engage with other local businesses, post news and so on.

Google Alerts

Ah, good old Google Alerts. Whilst it’s reliability has been called into question in recent times, there’s no doubt this still holds an important place in many online marketer and content creator’s hearts.

Using Google Alerts you can keep an eye on a topic of your choice with regular updates from Google themselves on the latest index updates. Common uses include finding non-linking citations of your brand, or to keep an eye on the latest news on a topic or company of interest.

Tag Manager

One of the most common frustrations in digital marketing can be the delay caused by waiting in a queue for development time. Google’s Tag Manager neatly gets round this, letting you update many of the most common site tags without having to ask for dev support.

This is a more advanced tool, but the benefits can be outsize. Once the code is installed on the site, a decent array of common marketing tags can be edited without a further code update. There’s support for URL, referrer and event based tags, custom macros and more, plus a debug console. There’s also planned further integration with third party tools to even more flexibility, and it’s possible to use tags from third-party tools such as Optimizely now.

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What is Alexa Traffic Rank and Its important in Websites Ranking

In simple terms, Alexa Traffic Rank is a rough measure of a website's popularity, compared with all of the other sites on the internet, taking into account both the number of visitors and the number of pages viewed on each visit.

Graph of Alexa Traffic Rank

Alexa collects traffic data on a daily basis from millions of users who have installed the Alexa Tool bar and other sources, and then uses a complex mathematical formula on three months' worth of data to arrive at the ranking for each site.

This can be interpreted as the website's position in a massive league table based on both visitor numbers and the number of pages viewed by each visitor. The 'most popular' site is given a rank of 1, the second 'most popular' a rank of 2, and so on down to the millions of websites that receive relatively few visitors.

A little history about Alexa Ranks

Founded in 1996, Alexa is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com (acquired by Amazon in 1999) that specializes in providing commercial web traffic data gathered via various toolbars and web browser extensions. Some of Alexa’s most notable previous activities include providing a database that served as the basis for the creation of the Wayback Machine and the creation of various search facilities (now largely discontinued). However, the thing they’re probably best known for is, of course, their ‘Alexa Rank’ – a metric that ranks websites in order of popularity or ‘how [well] a website is doing’ over the last 3 months. 

How are Alexa Ranks measured?

According to the official Alexa website’s Our Data page, the rank is calculated using a ‘combination’ of the estimated average daily unique visitors to the site and the estimated number of pageviews on the site over the past 3 months – with the site with the highest combination of unique visitors and pageviews being ranked as #1. The data is collected from a subset of internet users using one of 25,000 browser extensions for either Google Chrome, Firefox, and/or Internet Explorer. An algorithm then ‘corrects’ for various potential biases and attempts to compensate for visitors who might not be in Alexa’s measurement panel (a factor it historically hasn’t always tried to accommodate for) and normalizes the data based on the geographical location of visitors. 

How accurate is Alexa Traffic Rank?

You should bear in mind that the rankings are calculated using traffic data collected only from users who have the Alexa toolbar installed, and who may or may not be a representative sample of all those who use the internet.

As a result the number of visitors to each website may not be accurately estimated, especially where that site receives relatively few visitors. In general, traffic rankings of more than 100,000 should not be considered reliable, but used as a rough guide only.

Are Alexa Ranks important?

For most site owners, ‘how a website is doing’ is of course very important, however, when assessing your own website my advice would be to simply stick with Google Analytics data rather than to go attributing any significant meaning to your site’s Alexa Rank. When looking at competitor’s sites however, by all means take a quick peek at their Alexa Rank for a very rough idea of how popular their website is relative to yours (assuming the same kinds of people visit both sites – thereby hopefully minimizing some of the biases brought about by the significantly-less-than-perfect way in which Alexa gather their data); however we definitely wouldn’t go thinking a particular website gets more traffic than another merely on the basis that its Alexa Rank happens to be only a few thousand lower – and if the website you’re interested in happens to have a rank of anything even near the aforementioned 100,000 mark, it’s probably best not to go attributing any significant meaning to comparing Alexa Ranks at all!

How are Alexa’s traffic rankings determined?

Alexa’s traffic estimates and ranks are based on the browsing behavior of people in our global data panel which is a sample of all Internet users.

Alexa’s Traffic Ranks are based on the traffic data provided by users in Alexa’s global data panel over a rolling 3 month period. Traffic Ranks are updated daily. A site’s ranking is based on a combined measure of Unique Visitors and Pageviews. Unique Visitors are determined by the number of unique Alexa users who visit a site on a given day.

Page views are the total number of Alexa user URL requests for a site. However, multiple requests for the same URL on the same day by the same user are counted as a single Pageview. The site with the highest combination of unique visitors and pageviews is ranked #1. Additionally, we employ data normalization to correct for biases that may occur in our data.

If your site’s metrics are Certified you can display Global and Country ranks for your site based on Certified Site Metrics, instead of metrics estimated from our data panel.

Alexa’s Traffic Ranks are for top level domains only (e.g., domain.com). We do not provide separate rankings for subpages within a domain (e.g., http://www.domain.com/subpage.html ) or subdomains (e.g., subdomain.domain.com) unless we are able to automatically identify them as personal home pages or blogs, like those hosted on sites like Blogger (blogspot.com). If a site is identified as a personal home page or blog, it will have its own Traffic Rank, separate from its host domain.

For more information about Alexa’s traffic rankings, you can visit:

http://www.alexa.com/about

There are limits to statistics based on the data available. Sites with relatively low measured traffic will not be accurately ranked by Alexa. We do not receive enough data from our sources to make rankings beyond 100,000 statistically meaningful. (However, on the flip side of that, the closer a site gets to #1, the more reliable its rank.) This means that, for example, the difference in traffic between a site ranked 1,000,000 and a site ranked 2,000,000 has low statistical significance. Sites ranked 100,000+ may be subject to large ranking swings due to the scarcity of data for those sites. It is not unusual for such sites to decline to “No data” Traffic Ranks, or to improve suddenly.

How to Display Alexa rank on your Website?

using an Alexa widget like this you can display your site's Alexa rank on your site:

Just change undocopy.com to your website in two places in the HTML snippet below, and then copy and paste it into your website's HTML:

<a href="http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/yoursite.com"><script type="text/javascript" src="http://xslt.alexa.com/site_stats/js/t/a?url=yoursite.com"></script></a>

Here is a widget that displays both your site's Alexa rank and Sites Linking In count:

<a href="http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/yoursite.com"><script type="text/javascript" src="http://xslt.alexa.com/site_stats/js/s/a?url=yoursite.com"></script></a>

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Types of Internet Bots and How They Are Used

Internet bots are software applications that are used on the Internet for both legitimate and malicious purposes. Because of the increasing number of applications becoming available online, there are many different types of Internet bots that assist with running applications such as instant messenger and online gaming applications as well as analysis and gathering of data files.

Bots and Botnets are commonly associated with cybercriminals stealing data, identities, credit card numbers and worse. But bots can also serve good purposes. Separating good bots from bad can also make a big difference in how you protect your company’s website and ensure that that your site gets the Internet traffic it deserves.

The Most Good Bots are essentially crawlers sent out from the world’s biggest web sites to index content for their search engines and social media platforms. You WANT those bots to visit you. They bring you more business! Shutting them down as part of strategy to block bad bots is a losing strategy.

Googlebot – Googlebot is Google’s web crawling bot (sometimes also called a “spider”). Googlebot uses an algorithmic process: computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site. Googlebot’s crawl process begins with a list of webpage URLs, generated from previous crawl processes and augmented with Sitemap data provided by webmasters. As Googlebot visits each of these websites it detects links (SRC and HREF) on each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links are noted and used to update the Google index.

Baiduspider – Baiduspider is a robot of Baidu Chinese search engine. Baidu (Chinese: 百度; pinyin: Bǎidù) is the leading Chinese search engine for websites, audio files, and images.

MSN Bot/Bingbot – Retired October 2010 and rebranded as Bingbot, this is a web-crawling robot (type of Internet bot), deployed by Microsoft to supply Bing (search engine). It collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Bing (search engine).

Yandex Bot – Yandex bot is Yandex’s search engine’s crawler. Yandex is a Russian Internet company which operates the largest search engine in Russia with about 60% market share in that country. Yandex ranked as the fifth largest search engine worldwide with more than 150 million searches per day as of April 2012 and more than 25.5 million visitors.

Soso Spider – Soso.com is a Chinese search engine owned by Tencent Holdings Limited, which is well known for its other creation QQ. As of 13 May 2012, Soso.com is ranked as the 36th most visited website in the world and the 13th most visited website in China, according to Alexa Internet. On an average, Soso.com gets 21,064,490 page views everyday.

Exabot – Exabot is the crawler for ExaLead out of France. Founded in 2000 by search engine pioneers, Dassault Systèmes, ExaLead provides search and unified information access software.

Sogou Spider – Sogou.com is a Chinese search engine. It was launched August 4, 2004. As of April 2010, it has a rank of 121 in Alexa’s Internet rankings. Sogou provides an index of up to 10 billion web pages.

Google Plus Share – Google Plus lets you share recommendations with friends, contacts and the rest of the web – on Google search. The +1 button helps initialize Google’s instant share capabilities, and it also provides a way to give something your public stamp of approval.

Facebook External Hit – Facebook allows its users to send links to interesting web content to other Facebook users. Part of how this works on the Facebook system involves the temporary display of certain images or details related to the web content, such as the title of the webpage or the embed tag of a video. The Facebook system retrieves this information only after a user provides a link.

Google Feedfetcher – Used by Google to grab RSS or Atom feeds when users choose to add them to their Google homepage or Google Reader. Feedfetcher collects and periodically refreshes these user-initiated feeds, but does not index them in Blog Search or Google’s other search services (feeds appear in the search results only if they’ve been crawled by Googlebot).

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What is a sitemap and Why Use a Sitemap for website?

What is a sitemap?

 A sitemap is a file where you can list the web pages of your site to tell Google and other search engines about the organization of your site content. Search engine web crawlers like Googlebot read this file to more intelligently crawl your site.

Also, your sitemap can provide valuable metadata associated with the pages you list in that sitemap: Metadata is information about a webpage, such as when the page was last updated, how often the page is changed, and the importance of the page relative to other URLs in the site.

If your site’s pages are properly linked, our web crawlers can usually discover most of your site. Even so, a sitemap can improve the crawling of your site, particularly if your site meets one of the following criteria:

Your site is really large. As a result, it’s more likely Google web crawlers might overlook crawling some of your new or recently updated pages.

Your site has a large archive of content pages that are isolated or well not linked to each other. If you site pages do not naturally reference each other, you can list them in a sitemap to ensure that Google does not overlook some of your pages.

Your site is new and has few external links to it. Googlebot and other web crawlers crawl the web by following links from one page to another. As a result, Google might not discover your pages if no other sites link to them.

Your site uses rich media content, is shown in Google News, or uses other sitemaps-compatible annotations. Google can take additional information from sitemaps into account for search, where appropriate.

Why Use a Sitemap

Using sitemaps has many benefits, not only easier navigation and better visibility by search engines. Sitemaps offer the opportunity to inform search engines immediately about any changes on your site. Of course, you cannot expect that search engines will rush right away to index your changed pages but certainly the changes will be indexed faster, compared to when you don't have a sitemap.

Also, when you have a sitemap and submit it to the search engines, you rely less on external links that will bring search engines to your site. Sitemaps can even help with messy internal links - for instance if you by accident have broken internal links or orphaned pages that cannot be reached in other way (though there is no doubt that it is much better to fix your errors than rely on a sitemap).

If your site is new, or if you have a significant number of new (or recently updated pages), then using a sitemap can be vital to your success. Although you can still go without a sitemap, it is likely that soon sitemaps will become the standard way of submitting a site to search engines. Though it is certain that spiders will continue to index the Web and sitemaps will not make the standard crawling procedures obsolete, it is logical to say that the importance of sitemaps will continue to increase.

Sitemaps also help in classifying your site content, though search engines are by no means obliged to classify a page as belonging to a particular category or as matching a particular keyword only because you have told them so.

Having in mind that the sitemap programs of major search engines (and especially Google) are still in beta, using a sitemap might not generate huge advantages right away but as search engines improve their sitemap indexing algorithms, it is expected that more and more sites will be indexed fast via sitemaps.

Generating and Submitting the Sitemap

The steps you need to perform in order to have a sitemap for your site are simple. First, you need to generate it, then you upload it to your site, and finally you notify Google about it.

Depending on your technical skills, there are two ways to generate a sitemap - to download and install a sitemap generator or to use an online sitemap generation tool. The first is more difficult but you have more control over the output. You can download the Google sitemap generator from here. After you download the package, follow the installation and configuration instructions in it. This generator is a Python script, so your Web server must have Python 2.2 or later installed, in order to run it.

The second way to generate a sitemap is easier. There are many free online tools that can do the job for you. For instance, have a look at this collection of Third-party Sitemap tools. Although Google says explicitly that it has neither tested, nor verified them, this list will be useful because it includes links to online generators, downloadable sitemap generators, sitemap plugins for popular content-management systems, etc., so you will be able to find exactly what you need.

After you have created the sitemap, you need to upload it to your site (if it is not already there) and notify Google about its existence. Notifying Google includes adding the site to your Google Sitemaps account, so if you do not have an account with Google, it is high time to open one. Another detail that is useful to know in advance is that in order to add the sitemap to your account, you need to verify that you are the legitimate owner of the site.

Currently Yahoo! and MSN do not support sitemaps, or at least not in the XML format, used by Google. Yahoo!allows webmasters to submit “a text file with a list of URLs” (which can actually be a stripped-down version of a site map), while MSN does not offer even that but there are rumors that it is indexing sitemaps when they are available onsite. Most likely this situation will change in the near future and both Yahoo! and MSN will catch with Google because user-submitted site maps are just a too powerful SEO tool and cannot be ignored.

You can learn how to create indices and more about sitemaps at sitemaps.org.

After you’ve created your sitemaps (and potentially sitemap indices), you’ll need to register them with the various search engines. Both Google and Bing encourage webmasters to register sitemaps and RSS feeds through Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools.

Taking this step helps the search engines identify where your sitemap is — meaning that as soon as the sitemap is updated, the search engines can react faster to index the new content. Also, content curators or syndicators may be using your RSS feeds to automatically pull your content into their sites.

Registering your sitemap (or RSS feed) with Google and Bing gives the search engines a signal that your content has been created or updated before they find it on the other sites. It’s really a very simple process with both engines. 

To submit a sitemap to Google:

1. Ensure that the XML Sitemap is on your web server and accessible via its URL.
2. Log in to Google Webmaster Tools.
3. Under “Crawl,” choose “Sitemaps.”
4. Click on the red button in the upper right marked “Add/Test Sitemap.” Enter the URL of the sitemap and click “Submit Sitemap.”

To register a sitemap with Bing:

1. Ensure that the XML Sitemap is on your web server and accessible via its URL.
2. Log in to Bing Webmaster Tools.
3. Click on “Configure My Site” and “Sitemaps.”
4. Enter the full URL of the sitemap in the “Submit a Sitemap” text box.
5. Click “Submit.”

Another great reason to register sitemaps with Google specifically is to catch Sitemap errors. Google Webmaster Tools provides great information about the status of each Sitemap and any errors it finds:

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