Create and Submit a Sitemap

SEO tip of the Day: Create and Submit a Sitemap

You’ve chosen keywords, decided on a URL, and have a general outline of all the pages that will exist within your site and the organization in which they will branch out and link, but you still have to create a sitemap page for your website.
A sitemap is similar to a table of contents. It is an organized tree listing pages of your website that are public and accessible to both users and search crawlers. The general outline of the various sections of your site is a perfect blueprint for creating a site map.
Using a sitemap is vital to the success of websites, especially if your site is new or has a significant amount of updated or new pages. Although spiders will continue to crawl and index sites that do not have a sitemap, the importance of sitemaps increases as it is user-friendly and becoming the standard means by which a webmaster submits websites to search engines.
Typically a sitemap is listed in a hierarchical fashion with primary categories broken down into subcategories and a clear display of how each section links to others. Sitemaps not only organize your site for users, but it helps search engine robots see and find what pages exist on your site.
Two types of sitemaps exist: the HTML sitemap, and the XML sitemap. While an HTML sitemap is created primarily as an organization system for human internet users to read and view the breakdown of a website, an XML sitemap is created in code specifically for web crawlers to read and understand the breakdown of pages and structure of a site.
Of all the “white hat” SEO tips and tricks for optimizing a site, the creation of a sitemap is the most crucial and underestimated organic SEO strategy. If you choose to incorporate the use of a site map on your website, it is imperative to generate an XML sitemap in addition to the HTML sitemap in order for it to be picked up by search engines such as Google.
While there are a number of benefits to using a sitemap such as simplified navigation, one of the greatest aspects of sitemap generation is the ability for you to let search engines know right away about any updates or changes on your site. When you update your sitemap and submit the new one for search, the changes will be indexed faster than if you hadn’t used a sitemap. Outside of SEO purposes, maintaining a sitemap helps your pages stay organized and you can keep on top of assuring no links are lost or broken.

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Social Media Popularity Reflected in 2009

Social Media Popularity Reflected in 2009 Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year

It’s that time of year – tinsel and string lights come out from storage and the New Oxford American Dictionary announces its word of the year… just in time to wrap it up nicely and place it under the tree. 

Last year Oxford gave the gift of hypermiling but that didn’t take us very far at all.  However, this year is different — social networking-savvy folks are already more than familiar with the  2009 Word of the year:

Unfriend.

The ultimate Secret Santa gift, you’ll notice this one’s wrapped in bitterness and vinegar with a ribbon of denial, and tagged with one less number of friends than you had yesterday… and it’s going to take you a long time to figure out who it came from.

Oxford’s official definition of the verb unfriend is “To remove someone as a friend on a social networking site such as Facebook.”

Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program Christine Lindberg states “It has both currency and potential longevity. In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year.”

Lindberg continues to explain how “Most ‘un-‘ prefixed words are adjectives (unacceptable, unpleasant), and there are certainly some familiar ‘un-‘ verbs (uncap, unpack), but ‘unfriend’ is different from the norm.  It assumes a verb sense of ‘friend’ that is really not used (at least not since maybe the 17^th century!) Unfriend has real lex-appeal.”

Some runners up for the 2009 Word of the Year include the following:

Hashtag – a # [hash] sign added to a word or phrase that enables Twitter users to search for tweets (postings on the Twitter site) that contain similarly tagged items and view thematic sets

Intexticated – distracted because texting on a cell phone while driving a vehicle

Netbook – a small, very portable laptop computer with limited memory

Paywall – a way of blocking access to a part of a website which is only available to paying subscribers

Freemium – a business model in which some basic services are provided for free, with the aim of enticing users to pay for additional, premium features or content

Oxford determines the Word of the Year based on lexicographic tracking of the English vocabulary, observing how it changes from year to year.  Ultimately when the word is chosen, its selection reflects the mindset of the year as well as its potential to last and maintain cultural significance and use.

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