Many people build a website, submit it to a few search engines and
directories, mention it to a few friends, and then sit back and wait
for the customers to show up.
Unfortunately, it doesn't happen that way. Learning and
applying a few Internet marketing secrets
and search engine optimization
techniques is the minimum required for Internet marketing
success. Some of these techniques to help increase website
traffic involve the relationship between advertising and sitemaps.
To understand the value of a sitemap on your website, it may be of
benefit to place internet marketing and advertising in perspective.
Before the arrival and ascendence of the Internet, before there were
Internet businesses and Internet marketing, the main means of getting
your message in front of the public was by several standard advertising
venues. First there newspapers, then came radio, and then
there was television. For each of these media, the marketing
techniques became stylized and solidified. Each practitioner
learned what worked best for their particular means of expression and
target market.
Then, along came the Internet:
Whether it's an Internet business, or a more traditional venture,
however, the goal has remained the same...to somehow get the message to
the consumer.
Once you strip away all the high-tech trappings, that single goal
remains the focus of Internet marketing just as in the older,
apparently simpler, and less technical settings.
Another thing which time has NOT changed is the advertisement
itself. The best advertisements offer a solution to a problem
the reader might have. Written in a clear and concise manner,
they make sense, or perhaps they amuse. The message can be
approached from several different angles, and the writing of
advertising copy is an entire field in its own right...which we will
not pursue at the moment.
The same criteria apply to the headline used as well.
The headline is the hook, which when properly crafted, gives just
enough information to pique the curiosity of the reader while making
the image of the answer to the problem of the moment seem to be lurking
just a little further into the copy text itself. Entire books have been
written just on the subject of writing the right headline.
While the similar arts of writing good advertising copy and alluring
headlines are much the same, the means of getting the advertisement
into the hands of the reader, or onto the screen of the reader's
computer, has changed.
This is where the Internet has thrown the marketer a curve.
A newspaper was once delivered to the door, or was hawked on a street
corner...the newsboy yelling out the headline as a hook to get the
passersby to want to read...the rest of the story. The reader
might have bought the paper to read the news and, in the process, see
information about a new car sale...or they might have bought the
newspaper specifically to find out what cars were on sale, but in
either case the advertising was at least in their hands..
Whatever their motive, however, newspapers were easy to get hold of,
and everybody knew how to find the classifieds or the obituaries,
depending on their interests.
Since newspapers tended to be regional in nature, someone in San
Francisco did not have to worry about whether or not the car in the ad
was in New York or Boston.
Radio and television essentially followed in the newspaper's footsteps
at first, and much the same was true of them as has been said about
newspapers.
The globally accesible
Internet has changed a lot about advertising!
First of all, the product offered by an Internet business is not
necessarily regional any more. Someone in San Francisco CAN
read about, and possibly buy, a car that is located in Denver, New
York, or Boston.
Secondly, people from places scattered all over the earth can now
create an online business and sell many of their products and services
to the entire world.
The result of this is that there are millions, perhaps billions of
people trying to sell or buy on the Internet at any given
time. Each has their own major advertisement posted online,
and this advertisement is usually their website.
This is how people make money online, but it is no
longer merely sufficient to just have good advertising copy, a
good headline, and to place the advertisement in some local paper or
have it shown on the local TV station. Not only must the
website/advertisement meet all the requisite criteria for success, but
now the advertiser must figure out how to get THEIR advertisement read
as it floats in that sea of websites created by Internet
marketers, all seeking to sell the same thing to the same people.
The good news for the would-be Internet marketer is that anybody with a
computer can put up a website, but to get people to visit that website,
and perhaps make a purchase, requires more. This is also the
bad news. There are literally thousands or even millions of
websites offering the same thing that you have to offer, or at least an
alternative product.
In order to make your website stand out, one thing you can do is use
the Internet
marketing techniques of SEO or Search Engine Optimization.
Search engines are important to an internet business because it has
been estimated that about 85% of website visitors arrive through a
search engine listing. Performing some sort of search engine
optimization to a website will enable search engines to more
efficiently find, index, rank, and present all the websites floating in
the vast sea called "Internet".
There are many possible Internet marketing techniques involved in
search engine optimization, such as proper use of meta tags, use of
valuable content laden with keywords, and linking
from relevant sites to name a few.
One other technique is the use of a sitemap.
The more pages your site has, the more important a sitemap becomes.
Simply, a sitemap is a listing, or table of contents, of all the pages
on a site, together with their links. A link to the sitemap
should be placed on the index page at a very minimum. A
sitemap may be structured as a list of simple links, or may contain a
description of each page with the hyperlink to it.
At the moment, there are two particular types of sitemaps, defined by
the type of coding used.
The XML structure is really directed at search engines such as
Google. Here is the XML Sitemap for this site (opens in a new window). It is a series of clues to search engine spiders as
to the structure of the site. Upon accessing the sitemap, the search
engine's spider will follow the links on the sitemap, gathering data
about each page in its normal manner.
A sitemap which is laid out in HTML format tends to be more for the
sake of humans and sometimes contains descriptive text in addition to
the link and title of the page. For these reasons, you may
encounter sites that contain both types of sitemaps. Here is the HTML Sitemap for this site (opens in a new window).
A well-constructed sitemap serves two main purposes:
1. It allows a human visitor to look at the entire layout of
the site and perhaps find the page that addresses his or her concerns
more rapidly than following links from each page.
2. It allows search engine spiders to more rapidly and
completely access, index, and evaluate all the pages of the
site. This last feature can contribute to a higher site
ranking in some cases, and, at the least, provides the search engine
more possible pages to attract and lead visitors to the site.
While a sitemap can be constructed using basic html, there are free
sitemap builders or generators available. These can be found
simply by performing a search under one of those terms.
Search engines such as Google, and some directories, such as Yahoo,
permit the webmaster to submit sitemaps directly. This tends
to cause a more rapid indexing of the site and is a more effective way
of getting all the pages of a site into the search engine than normally
happens as the spider wanders around the Internet following links.
You can build a sitemap for free at www.xml-sitemaps.com.
I assume that if you are reading this little article, you are probably
planning to do some SEO (search
engine optimization)
yourself, and a good place to start this Internet
marketing technique is by adding a sitemap to your site.
Most Internet marketers, yours truly included, acquired the Internet marketing tools
currently in their toolkit at great personal cost...both in time and
money. However, if you know how to go about it, you can
access an Internet
marketing course which teaches genuinely
successful Internet
marketing techniques
at a cost far less than the thousands of dollars many of us have
spent! In fact, as I write this, the foremost company in this
field is providing a trial of their highly acclaimed Internet marketing
training online for only $2.95!
There is much to learn when it comes to the role of domain names in a
search engine optimization strategy. Strategy and technique
can
be confusing, of course, but there is also training
available at reasonable costs. Nobody entering the field
today needs to suffer for lack of understanding when it comes to Internet marketing techniques.
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for more information about how to acquire a vast education in Internet
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year.
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