Running even a small website is easy. Marketing, Managing and Promoting it on the other hand can be a bear if you don’t have the right tools. In this post I’m going to review a couple tools that I use on this site and tell you how they help me.
1. XML Sitemap.
An XML Sitemap is a way of telling search engines what’s on your site and how old it is. XML sitemaps contain a listing of every page on your site, how important the page is, how often the page is updated, and the last time it was updated (The last three are optional). Search engines use this to help them more efficiently spider your site. Additionally you can push the sitemap out to search engines after it’s changed to help them index new pages more quickly. I’ve seen a new page in the google index within an hour of publishing it thanks to my XML Sitemap.
To create an XML Sitemap you can either learn XML (It’s actually not that hard) and manually create it one page at a time (Tedious) OR you can use this wonderful and free tool at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com. It’s simple, just tell it the address of your site, fill in a few simple parameters and in a few minutes you have an XML Sitemap you can upload to your site and submit to google.
Create your sitemap at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com
2. Web Analytics.
Web traffic statistics are great. They tell you who came to your site, where they came from, what browser they were using and a few other basic pieces of information. This is nice but Web Analytics takes it to the next level. Not only do you know who came from where when, but you can also find out what they did while they were there, how many times they came back, how long between visits, how many visits until they purchased and more. The players in the web analytics game have prices ranging into the 10’s of 1000’s of dollars per year and more. In fact I make a descent living with a Major Multinational company being the primary implementation person for their implementation of Omniture SiteCatalyst which is the biggest player in the web analytics game. But for my personal sites Google Analytics is the way I go. There are things that the more expensive solutions do that Google Analytics doesn’t do quite as well, but for a small site and for free you can’t beat this bargain. Just paste a small snippet of JavaScript on the bottom of your pages and Google Analytics does the rest.
To find out more visit http://www.google.com/analytics
3. Google Webmasters Tools.
Where Web Analytics help you see what your visitors are seeing Google Webmasters Tools help you see your site as the Search Engines See it. You get statistics on when it was crawled, how long it took, what the crawl speed was, how your content is ranked in Google and more. Google Webmasters Tools also shows you something that Web Analytics and Web Statistics can’t. You see Web Analytics and Web Statistics can show you what keywords led to someone clicking through to your site. Google WebMasters Tools shows you keyword combinations that were searched for where your site was displayed but not clicked on. This can be very helpful in rewording your site to bring more traffic in.
Another fantastic feature in Google Webmasters Tools is the ability to manage your XML Sitemaps. You can specifically tell google where your XML Sitemap is located and then let them know whenever you update your sitemap.
To get setup with Google Webmasters Tools go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
4. Affiliate programs/Google Adsense
The last items I’m going to tell you about relates more to personal web pages and blogs than it does to business sites. That’s because it’s a method of placing advertising on your site to help you generate income from your site. Obviously if you’re running a business site you want to focus on your own business and not advertising someone elses, but if you’re running a blog and you want to try to recoup some of the cost (Or even make a little profit) Google Adsense and Amazon Associates are two great ways to do it.
Google Adsense is obviously a program run by google which allows you to place ads for googles partners on your site. The ads look like this
or can be different shapes depending on how you create them. You can somewhat limit what they show but it’s not exactly fine grained. Google does take the content of the page they’re on into account when generating the ads, so they should be somewhat relevant to the content of your page. When your visitors click on the ads, you get credit and earn CASH for it, this is not some obscure points program. They pay you CASH.
To learn more about Google Adsense go to http://www.google.com/adsense
Amazon Associates is similar, but not identical to Google Adsense. This one is obviously run by Amazon.com and the biggest difference is that you can choose EXACTLY what you want to put on your page. Say you read a great book and decide to post a review of it on your blog. On that review you can post a link where visitors can purchase the book from Amazon.com and for everyone that does you get paid!. Again CASH.
For more about Amazon Associates visit http://www.amazom.com/associates
Both these programs are free to participate in and just require adding a small javascript tag to your site to display the content.
As I said earlier managing, marketing and promoting your site can be a bear but with these few tools your life just got a whole lot easier.
Thanks For Stopping By
Eric
P.S. If you really don’t feel like messing with the nuts and bolts of your website you can call us at Gateway Business Solutions and we can handle it from top to bottom for you. Visit us at http://www.gatewaybusinesssolutions.com
