XML sitemap is used by spiders to ease the tracking of content in the website. XML sitemap is an XML file that contains all the links available in a particular website and also information on the las updated date of those particular pages along with information on how often will the page be updated. The more frequent the page is updated, the more time spiders will visit that particular page to update their database.

How does XML sitemap look like

A very basic XML sitemap that contains one URL will look something as follow:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <url>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
      <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
      <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
      <priority>0.8</priority>
   </url>
</urlset>

Check out sitemaps.org for further details on all the available tags and how to implement them.

How to Generate Sitemaps Easily

Depending on the system and the hosting you are using, there are different ways to generate sitemap.

1. Create it yourself. This option is only good when you do not have a lot of pages in your site. But if you have more than 10 pages, I do not recommend creating the sitemaps yourself. It is a headache.
2. Use readily available sitemap generator. This is the better option, and moreover it is freely available, so why not?

Easy to Use Sitemap Generator

If you are using WordPress, it is quite easy to get a sitemap. Just install the sitemap plug-in for wordpress and your sitemap will be generated and submitted automatically to search engines.

For others, use the tool provided by XML Sitemap. This is a very good tool that will crawl all the available location in your site and generates the corresponding sitemap. Remember to check the generated sitemap though, since there are some pages that you would not want google, yahoo or MSN to index.

What To Do With Generated Sitemap?

After you have a sitemap, it is time to submit it to the search engines so they can start crawling your site. See the procedure on submitting web pages to Google, Yahoo and MSN. Although there are more search engines out there, most probably you just need to submit your sitemap to the biggest search engines.

1. Not enough time to write their own articles for SEO purpose
2. Hiring a freelance is expensive
3. Cheap freelance normally does not produce good enough quality articles or e-book.

Due to those reasons, people tend to look for PLR content that are readily available. With PLR content, writers and webmasters can twist these articles, e-books and other types of PLR contents to their liking. These tweaks could be re-writing the content, claim the PLR as their own by putting in their name as author and even sell these PLR content with their own pricing.

The downside of using Free PLR contents

Although the possibility seems endless, there are several downsides to Free PLR content. Since it is readily available, hundreds and thousands of people might be using the same article or e-book. In order to be distinct, you should rewrite these free PLR content before publishing. Re-writing a PLR content is actually 3 times easier than writing your own article from scratch since the layout and the topic has already been made available.

Where do I find good quality free PLR content?

The best one in the market is Sure Fire Wealth. They provide a lot of free PLR content with giveaway rights. Sure Fire Wealth provides silver and gold membership program for further benefits.

Silver program allows you to take full advantage of all the free membership advantages plus audio/video, e-books and software downloads with resell rights.

With the gold membership programs, access will be open to even better rights; including master resell rights, access to free and silver membership advantages, free 10 MB hosting account, and great selection of more professional PLR e-books, videos and audio.

For starters though, I strongly recommend you to check out their free lessons on PLR usage first and join their membership program. Get a FREE ONE YEAR SILVER MEMBERSHIP today in Sure Fire Wealth and make use of their Free PLR contents to your advantage.

The internet world has been swept by Web 2.0 storm. Blogs and blogging in general is one of the main contributor in the web 2.0. phenomena where social media are getting more attention. Blogging starts of only as a way to express oneself; call it an online diary if you like. After tweaking and exposures to the internet world though, blogging has shifted in direction. Nowadays, more and more blogs are going live as a way of self actualization in the internet world. People get more focused and blog in a specific direction, not as general as it originally was.

A free publishing method

Blogging could also be considered as a free publishing method. With blogs in hand, we are able to release contents without going through the hassle of contacting a publishing company, reviewers and all those traditional rushes that traditional publishing have. Even better, for bloggers, we are giving out information in the form of opinions and personal experiences which resulted in a more intimate relationship with readers.

Blogging also leverage social communication through the means of commenting. By commenting, bloggers and site owners get to know each other. And who knows, a joint venture might just sprung

Looking forward

Due to this leverage, more and more information can be attained through blogs. Be it through the original article that was written by the blog owner and even more resources from the comment section where visitor actually left their thought. In response to these high quality contents, people and companies are starting to advertise in blogs relevant to their field. This resulted in some people actually making huge amount of full-time income through blogging.

Some bloggers are really going big and become an authority figure in their respective areas, take for example Yaro Starak who gain his success through entrepreneurs-journey, Jeremy Schoemaker in his blog shoemoney, Brian Clark through copyblogger and Daren Rowse through ProBlogger. These people started off doing what they love and blog about it.

Starting Out to Blog

How do you start blogging? there are a lot of blogging platform out there. The most popular at the time of writing is blogger and WordPress. These blogging platform not only offer ease of setting up, they also offer free hosting to start with.

If you are really interested in becoming a professional blogger, join the blog mastermind program by Yaro Starak, there's a ton of great information and helps provided. If you want to know the quality of Yaro's material, feel free to download the blog profit blueprint here. It is free and available for public.

Hope you have fun if you plan on blogging

This way of marketing is considered amazing since it hardly includes any money but the return provided will be more than worth it. It involves you and your creative juices and a bit of a work. The return though will come back to you in a big amount. Send 1 or 2 articles daily, and in a month, you will see a significant increase in visitors to your site.

One of the longest standing article repository is Ezine Articles which has a strict qualification on entering. All the articles will be reviewed and hand picked by their reviewer which makes the articles featured in Ezine Articles really valuable. These article repositories serves a huge range of niches, from gardening all the way to internet marketing. Get your articles up and you will see a great ROI.

Other recommended article repositories include:

1. Go Articles
2. Idea Marketers

There are actually tons of article directories out there, if you are serious about getting yourself known in all of these article directories, you might also want to consider getting SubmitYourArticle or Isnare service. They will take your articles and pass them around to the most well-known article directories around.

Another great point about article marketing is that you do not only get your links public, but you will also expose yourself as one of the experts in your field which in turn will convince more and more visitors.

There are a lot of free tools available to keep track of these visits. The most popular one at the moment is google analytics since it is free and the reporting tool provided is really great, including website optimizer, graph to analyze the origin of your visitors and many others.

Another analytics tool that has been gaining popularity recently is Crazy Egg with the concept of heat map. You can view the analysis on the most clicked areas in your web pages. This tool is not free though, the subscription starts off at 9$ per month. If you are a serious analytical geek, this tool will provide you with a great satisfaction.

Some other analytics tools worth mentioning are:

1. StatCounter - Free analytics tool, provides an invisible counter for tracking your visitor.
2. 103Bees - Provides search traffic analytics. 30 days trial available.
3. Woopra - Provides a downloadable client application for monitoring.
4. Hittail - Similar to 103 bees, providing suggestion on topic of your website based on search engine traffic.

Since del.icio.us took off promoting social bookmarking, more and more people are getting involved in its service and sharing and bookmarking more and more sites. Social bookmarking has grown significantly that if one of your article or pages is found in these bookmarking sites; this specific page has some prestige in the net. Moreover, if the site keeps getting more and more recommendation, it will be shown more often and lead to more and more visitor.

Some very popular bookmarking sites are as follow:

1. del.icio.us
2. digg
3. stumble upon
4. technorati
5. google bookmarks
6. and many others

Due to its popularity, these social bookmarking site has some advantages to the eye of search engine spiders. Even without search engines jumping in, through social bookmarking, people can easily find some high quality sites through these services. Even better, with Stumble Upon and its concept of stumbling; user can easily press a button and a random page suggested by other users will be loaded in their browser window. This service has also gain interest lately (I have been using it day in day out to relieve my boredom) and some hidden internet gems are uncovered through this service.

Drawback of social bookmarking and how it is being misused

Nowadays, internet marketers use these social bookmarking tools to promote their sites since these services attract a flock of highly targeted consumers. Some of these people are even paying incentives for people to get their site submitted to user's bookmark page.

Some other people actually created new registration IDs on these social sites specifically to bookmark and promotes their own sites. This become somewhat spammish if the service or product offered is not really worth the time.

When and why I do not mind the misuse of social bookmarking

Although socially bookmarking your site through offering incentive is not a really fair way of playing things, I personally would not mind if the service or product is of quality and actually draws people interest.  Anyway, no matter how much incentives being offered, great quality sites will always get more suggestion through social bookmarking simply by the sheer amount and quality the content provides.

What do you think personally? would you go as far as creating several IDs simply for promoting your site? would you actually offer incentives for people to bookmark your site? why and why not?

Previously, layout and site design have always been the thing that I am concerned about. Thus adding cute graphics, scripts and all other things that will make the site look pretty and eye catching to the visitors became my priority. Well, one thing for sure, both humans and spiders love contents more than anything else, be it site design, cute layout, appealing animation, etc. (surely that does not mean we can slap a bright yellow text on top of a white background!!)

Difference between spiders and humans

Although both are visiting your website, there are differences in how each creatures (spiders and humans) view, interpret, and evaluate your site.

Visitors (human in this case) will see your site, marvel at your site design for 5 seconds (as I said earlier, slapping yellow text on top of a white background or colorful background will just make them leave in an instant), and start looking at your content. In your content itself, they will try to get valuable information and if they do not find any, they will leave in that given second (there's a reason the internet is called information superhighway).

While spiders on the other hand, will look at your texts (readable part of your pages straight away). If you put images, it will read the tags and the description contained in the image tags. It will not be thrilled with your state-of-the-art web design (including all the fancy graphics and scripts that make your pointer shines) but instead will skip to the content.

This means you as the webmaster, has to be able to provide these little spiders with content that they want so they can arrange it properly for future searches and at the same time you have to entertain human readers so they don't run away after seeing your layout and designs.

To support spiders - but not forgetting human reader

Here are some tactics that you can try to implement in your website to make the spiders perform their best and at the same time keeping the human counterpart.

1. Reducing scripts clutter in the page. A perfect example of script clutter is a dropdown menu bar which is created using javascript. This menu will normally take precedence and is located right under head tag of the page. Instead of inserting the whole chunk of the code at the beginning of the page, put it at the bottom of the page and call it up above.
2. Tag your pictures. In order to let the spiders perform well, make sure you tag your pictures with relevant names that depict the content of your page and your image.
3. Use reasonable amount of headings to separate a huge chunk of content. This does not only help the spiders to recognize the content of the pages but also helps human readers to process big amount of information

Search Engine submission result

Nowadays, people say that search engine submission does not really help in getting your site indexed. This needs to be rephrased, the submission does not get your site to the top position, but the sitemap and the submission itself helps the search engines to recognize that your site exists.

For this site itself, search engines actually indexed it in less than 2 weeks! When I did a search for seoandaffiliates, Google, Yahoo and MSN has already shown this site. As I said, this action does help your site to get indexed, but not to get the top rankings in these search engines.

The big players

Although there are many search engines out there, there are only several big search engines that are preferred by the worldwide user. The rest of the search engines are getting their data either from directories or from the bigger search engines. Here are the listings of the search engines that dominates the world:

1. Google. Check the tutorial on website submission to google.
2. Yahoo. Check the tutorial on website submission to yahoo.
3. MSN live search. Check the tutorial on website submission to MSN.
4. Alexa.
5. ASK.com.

Tips: For Alexa submission, you can simply download their toolbar and visit your site with the toolbar installed. And as quoted from Alexa site itself "If you are the type of person who won't be satisfied until you get to click a button that says "Crawl My Site,"" then visit this submission page.

After a few days or weeks, you will have your site indexed as I did. Good luck and have fun submitting!!

Submission of site to MSN is really simple, head over to  MSN Live Search website submission page; type in your website address, type in the alphabets in the image, press submit and voila! You're done.

Sitemap submission

To further help MSNBot in indexing your website, submit your sitemap file (normally sitemap.xml). To submit sitemap file, go to Live search webmasters centre. You have to login using your MSN live or any other Microsoft account that you have (or create one if you do not have one by visiting Windows Live sign-up page).

First page you will see is the submission page. Fill in the text boxes with your site address and the location of your sitemap.xml

When this is done, you will be asked to do an authentication to make sure that the site belongs to you.

Authentication process

For authentication, you have to options to choose from. One is by uploading an XML file provided by them into your website. Download the XML file from Live Search link and upload the file to the root folder of your website.

Second option is to add a META tag to your website homepage. Copy the META tag provided here.

Add this META tag to your <head> tag in your homepage right after putting the <title> tag as shown below.

Sample META tag authentication for Live Search

When you have updated your site by any of the method mentioned, go back to your website listing page (homepage of Live Search Webmaster Tool) and your last verification method along with the authentication code will be shown.

We are done adding the site to MSN. Soon enough your site will be crawled and indexed in Live Search, cheers!!

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The submission process is relatively simple. Sign in to your Google account (sign up here if you do not have a Google account). Access Google webmasters tool afterwards and you will be presented with the dashboard.

Insert your web site address in the text box provided and add site. This action will bring you to the overview page of the web site that you have just added. There is an option presented in the page to verify the ownership of your page. You can either verify your site first or add a site map to Google to make it faster for the search engine to access and index your site.

Verification process

This verification process is also straightforward, you can access it by clicking the link at the Overview page or by selecting tools -> manage site verification on the left sidebar menu.

Here, you can choose a verification method. Either by adding a file provided by Google to your website root folder or by adding a meta tag to your homepage. To add the file, choose "Upload an HTML file" from the textbox. Here, you will be presented with a name for your HTML file; create an HTML file with the name suggested. Save and upload it to your website main directory. (Sorry for the censored web address google generated key since it was my friend's site and he does not want the site name to be seen. I have tried to use my site, but apparently since it is already verified, I could not re-verify it)

Second option is by adding a META tag to your website homepage. Select "Add a meta tag" from the textbox. You will be presented with an HTML tag to be put inside your homepage <head> tag. Copy the META tag that looks like this <meta name="verify-v1" content="asfdas32413sadg@=as />.

Add this tag to your homepage by using a text editor provided by your web hosting or make a copy of your homepage, add the tag and upload it. The META tag will look like this during addition.

META tag example

After either of this steps done, click the verify button. If everything is done correctly, you will be presented with a page stating that the verification has been done successfully and the status will be set to pending.

Sitemap Submission

Sitemap helps the search engine to crawl your site effectively. Normally Google accepts the sitemap in XML format or .gz format (zipped XML sitemap). To add your website sitemap, access the sitemap portion of Google webmasters tool by going to sitemaps ' overview from the menu sidebar on your left.

Enter the location of your sitemap in the textbox provided and submit sitemap. If everything goes well, you will be presented with information that your sitemap is being crawled and the status is pending.

There you go, submit your site, sitemap and verify your site. In a week or more, your site will be indexed.

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