If you run an online business or have a website for your business, here is an Online Business Tips for you. You’d certainly want your site to be listed in the first page of the Google Search Result for your targeted keyword. Being listed on the first page of a search result will bring more visitors to your website. Which, will result in more sales for your business from your web site.

Why the first page? When you do a search for a product on the net, how many pages of the search results do you go to in order to find whatever it is you were looking for? Do you actually go through all the pages in the Search Results or do you only look at the first page? I believe I’ve only gone to as far as the third page when looking for something on the net via any search engine. So, if your web site is not positioned in the first page of the search results, will people ever find you? If people can’t find you, how are you going to get any sale off your web site?

Lets take a look at a real life example. I’m currently working on a particular site. One of the targeted keyword for this site is Multi Function Printer Malaysia. As of this writing, the site is not even listed in the first 20 pages of the search results. Yes, I went all the way to page 20 of the search result. There are about 524,000 sites in the search result for the targeted keyword. 524,000 sites to compete with for the first page position. How long do you think it will take for a fairly new site to get into the first page?

Another keyword being targeted is Multi Function Copier Malaysia. Again, looking at the search results for the keyword, I found the site listed in page 14 of the search results. Not bad for a fairly new site. Perhaps, it’s because there are only about 23,500 sites listed in the results. Less competition. Still, it’s not listed in the first page, not good for an online business. Need to move up the ranks and get into the first page. This is perhaps an easier task since there are less competition.

Will I be able to move the site up in the Search Engine Results Pages? I really do think I can. Certainly not going to be a walk in the park type of task. Need to work on some of the contents in the site. Perhaps a restructure is needed? How about we revisit this topic in about a month from now. See where the site is after I work on it a bit. While at it, I will also be working on my Technology And Computing Tips site. What say you?

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!

 

What is a sitemap?

A sitemap basically is a list of all the pages in your website. There are two forms of sitemaps. One for your readers and the other for search engines and webcrawler programs.

For your readers, the sitemap is merely a page on your site that acts like a Table of Contents. It organizes all your internal pages according to their corresponding topics or categories. Take a look at the Technology and Computing Tips Sitemap as an example.

The Sitemap for Technology and Computing Tips is created by the Sitemap Generator Plugin from Dagon Design. That’s the good thing about running a website with WordPress. The existence of plugins such as this makes life easy for web administrators of WordPress sites. With the plugin installed, all that’s needed to create a sitemap page for your readers is to create a page in wordpress and insert this script -

<!-- ddsitemapgen -->

The rest, as they say, is history – Your Sitemap page is then generated automatically by the plugin. Isn’t that just nice and dandy?

For the search engines, a slightly different sitemap is required. A sitemap for the search engines need to follow a certain standard. This is because, the search engines are using programs that read the sitemap to obtain information about your website. At present, the Sitemap protocol is in version 0.90. This Sitemap protocol is currently widely adopted by Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. What this means – the major search engines in the internet is now able to crawl and index your pages better if you have a sitemap.

For those of you who still prefers to run a flash based site, you would probably want to create a sitemap file of your site specifically for the search engines.

I’ve just installed the Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress into the Technology and Computing Tips. The plugin automatically generates an XML Sitemap that complies with the Sitemap Protocol. Once again, thanks to the availability of such plugins, the generation of the sitemap file is automated in WordPress. Take a look at the Technology and Computing Tips Sitemap File as an example.

However, bear in mind, there is no guarantee that your website will be indexed as soon as you have your sitemap. The search engines also do not guarantee that pages listed in the sitemap will be indexed. Don’t fret though. At the very least, you are assured that should the search engines come crawling to your site, they have a sitemap to assist them in indexing your pages.

I think I’ll monitor the traffic to this site. See if the traffic increases at all now that I have a sitemap installed.

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!