Posts Tagged ‘site maps’

How to start your own business, easily.

Making money online is really a lot simpler than most people would ever imagine, it really comes down to three easy steps.

First, you need to have a product people want to buy.

Second, you need to be able to sell the product to people.

Finally, you need to be able to collect money from people effectively.

What’s great about the Internet is that all these things are already completed!

Let’s say for example that you want to sell t shirts online. The first thing you’ll need is to find a t shirts wholesale supplier. Luckily, you can pick up a blank t shirt or several hundred blank shirts from a good company. The beauty of ordering blank t-shirts is that you can literally print straight from you computer to meet the needs of custom orders!

The second step? Using WordPress, a simple store can be setup which allows you to sell products to users locally or around the world. WordPress is a perfect solution for many small business owners because when it’s setup correctly it can take care of organic marketing, search engine optimization, site maps and other technical aspects automatically.

Finally, you need to  be able to accept payment and ship the goods to users. Using PayPal, you can quickly and easily accept online payments plus PayPal has built in integration to the US Postal Service for easy printing of mailing labels. PayPal even lets you buy and print stamps directly from their easy to use website.

So there you have, three easy steps to finding a supplier, building a website and accepting online payments for small business owners just venturing onto the web. If you have questions, I’d love to hear from you or if you’d like to add to the discussion please feel free to contribute your thoughts.

SEO News Worth Watching

Search Engine Watch pointed to Bill Slawski’s latest patent find, an application by Yahoo entitled Automated System to Improve Search Engine Optimization on Web Pages. For anybody interested in organic marketing trends, all three of these articles are a must read.  There’s another piece at Yahoo Plans to Automate SEO that summaries much the same thing.

Avoiding SEO mistakes is pretty easy these days as long as you follow some basic guidelines but where oh where can you gain access to these oracles of knowledge? Frankly, I’d start by reading the Google SEO & Quality Guidelines and Yahoo SEO Guidelines. After you’re done that, take a look through my own blog here or pop over to read Blog SEO Tips: Top SEO Mistakes to Avoid and Basic SEO Tools for Real Estate.

My article yesterday about Improving your SEO with Site Maps will be able to walk some of you through the simple art of WordPress SEO and you all should check out the new contest I’ve posted for this month, with three great prizes for all of you!

Improve your SEO with Site Maps

Every day people take the time to read my posts on building better websites and optimizing website content but I’ve not written about one of the most important aspects of Search Engine Optimization previously, the dreaded site map. To be honest, I haven’t written about it because I assumed everybody knew how important a site map was and simply implemented them without question. Apparently I was wrong.

Let’s start by determining what I mean by a site map and then we can look at how to properly use one. There are two types of site maps common on the Internet today. The first is a hypertext document filled with all the links on your website, organized in a way that is comfortable for people  to read. The second is an XML data file designed for search engines and other computers to read.

Both types of site maps are important for SEO (let’s call it organic marketing instead) because it helps search engines and visitors traverse your website more effectively. Visually, having a site map allows visitors to quickly load an index of all the pages on your website and find what they’re looking for while it also allows search engines to link to various pages and ensures your whole website is indexed. Mechanically, the XML variety also provides major search engines with the ability to know when pages are updated on a website.

In essence, a site map is a document that acts as a table of contents for your website and both people and machines use it the same way, to rapidly find areas of your website which would otherwise be difficult to locate.

For those of us who have had our websites designed in WordPress, the task of implimenting a site map is pretty straight forward. Simply download and install a plugin such as the Google XML Sitemaps before signing up for a Google Web Master Tools account. Once you’re signed up, you can specify the URL of your XML file and you’re all done.

Articles worth reading: