 |
 |
|
   |
|
 Issue #22 - May 19th, 2003 Internet Marketing Newsletter for Small Businesses
Brought to you by idesignbusiness.com http://www.idesignbusiness.com Issue #22 Monday, May 19th, 2003 In this Issue: ARTICLES: ONLINE POLL: FREE RESOURCE: Welcome back to another issue of the Internet Marketing Newsletter for Small Business. For those of you that are reading this newsletter for the first time, I hope you enjoy it and make sure you check out the Newsletter Archive. This weeks article covers a couple simple things you can do to your website to improve your Search Engine Presence. As always, I want to hear from you! Please direct all newsletter correspondence to newsletters@idesignbusiness.com You can view all past issues of the Internet Marketing Newsletter for Small Businesses at the newsletter archive. Click below to visit the archive: Newsletter Archive Neal St. Clair idesignbusiness Advertisement >> Discover The Secrets The Pros Use To Make Money Making money online doesn't have to be a chore. Find out how to do it simple, easy and hassle free. Grab your copy of Turn Your Autoresponder Into A Cash Cow * Sell truckloads of your products or services using 52 professionally written sales messages * Automatically build your own opt-in list, giving away the FREE Report * Find out how 4 successful netrepreneurs use powerful autoresponder messages to sell their stuff. Discover the secrets now http://www.bpcpublishing.net/reps/c.cgi/bpc_moo40 Online Poll Do you think web development prices are too high? ARTICLE Sitemaps and Hypertext Links: "Food" for Search Engine Robots Daria Goetsch Search Innovation Original Publication Date - March 10, 2003 Sitemaps and hypertext links are "food" for search engine robots. We will look at the value of text links for optimal spidering, and the importance of using a sitemap in order to help search engine robots reach your website's deeper pages. Hypertext Links Search engine robots are not terribly sophisticated. They cannot click a button, submit a form, pull down a menu, or perform any other type of online "user interaction" that might be used by a human visitor. Robots are able to index the text on a page and click through hypertext links. For this reason, adding navigational text links to your web pages (often located at the bottom of the page) provides the search engine robots with another means to click through the links of your web pages when it cannot access these other types of navigation. No matter how great your JavaScript menu system is, the search engine robots cannot use it. They can follow "plain old" hyperlinks, and that's about it. Since the ability to move around on your site is vital to the robots' successful indexing of your content, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to visit all of your pages. Use of text links at the bottom of your pages, while hardly cutting-edge, is one of the best ways to make sure that the search engine robots can move around on your site. Be sure to include links to your site's principal pages on all the pages in your site. Always remember to put a link to your sitemap page here too. Sitemaps A sitemap page is a supercharged version of the bottom-of-the-page hypertext links. The sitemap provides "food" for a hungry search engine robot. A sitemap page will at very least have links to all of the major pages on your site. Depending on the size of your site, it may actually link to all of your pages. This means that once the robot gets to the sitemap page, it can visit every page on your entire site. Having all of the content of your site included in the search engine database is a good thing: you are much more likely to come-up in the search engine results when somebody is performing a search related to your topic. A good sitemap will:
To make your sitemap most attractive to the search engine robots and your human visitors, be sure to include descriptive text along with the page URLs and links. Use your keywords in that text, including appropriate content for each of the pages to which you link. Be careful not to overuse your keyword phrases, though, or you may be penalized in the rankings. Remember that this is a map that will be used by both search engine robots and your human visitors. If the content of the page makes sense to the people who visit your site, chances are it will make sense to the visiting robots as well. When you make it easy for your visitors to navigate your site, they will find what they are looking for. When you make it easy to search engine robots to move around on your site, you increase your chances of being favorably listed in their search results. # # # Daria Goetsch is the founder and Search Engine Marketing Consultant for Search Innovation Marketing (www.searchinnovation.com), a Search Engine Promotion company serving small businesses. Besides running her own company, Daria is an associate of WebMama.com, an Internet web marketing strategies company. She has specialized in search engine optimization since 1998, including three years as the Search Engine Specialist for O'Reilly & Associates, a technical book publishing company. Copyright © 2003 Search Innovation Marketing. All Rights Reserved. Advertisement Free Website Hosting! Sign up for an idesignbusiness hosting account by May 15th and pay nothing for your first month! We will waive your setup fee and handle all the setup for you. Your satisfaction is 100% guaranteed. If you are not completely satisfied after 30 days, you pay nothing. Get all the great features of more expensive web host at an affordable cost. Sign-up today, no Credit Card is required. Click here to learn more. FREE RESOURCE: Each issue of the Internet Marketing Newsletter for Small Businesses will include helpful free online resources to promote your website. Computer security is a growing concern. This free resource allows you can scan your system (with or without registering) and check your PC for viruses, or check to see how well your anti virus program is working. This will work right over the Internet. Trend Micro - Online Virus Scanner ABOUT idesignbusiness idesignbusiness provides Web marketing and technology solutions for small businesses. We utilize a combination of consulting and technology expertise to create customized and flexible solutions. Please visit http://www.idesignbusiness.com for more information. SUBSCRIPTION NOTICE This newsletter is only sent to opt-in subscribers. If at anytime you would like to be removed from this list, please send an e-mail to newsletters@idesignbusiness.com with REMOVE in the subject line or click on the remove link below. Spread the word - Please forward to friends and colleagues. Copyright 2002 - 2003 idesignbusiness http://www.idesignbusiness.com |
 |
 |
|
Contact | Home | Site Map © Copyright 2001 - 2005 idesignbusiness |