Web & Technology

Lacking any information to the contrary, many businesses still think that all they need to do to get new clients is to put their name and face in the Yellow Pages or online social directories, get some professional looking business cards, a website and Voila! It’s the old adage “build it and they will come”.

Trouble is, that’s what their competitors are doing also and in this day and age, it’s just not enough.

Does Your Business Stand Out Online?

Most advertising on the Web follows a time-honored format, although some might call it a time-worn format as it does little to differentiate itself. You can bet that a high percentage of this advertising will be ignored and the money spent on it will be wasted.
So how does a company stand out from the crowd online?

Thanks to an oversupply of similar text, claims, and presentation – coupled with a short 21st century attention span – your website has less than ten seconds to move a visitor to action. If it doesn’t, that visitor will click away to another site, and then another. Therefore, it’s critical that you find a way to break through the noise your competitors are making. But even that’s not enough.

Statistics show that even the best-looking websites generate conversion rates of under one percent, so for every 100 visitors you do manage to get, less than one will call or email you. Sound bleak? Thinking of redirecting more of your advertising budget back to the Yellow Pages? Don’t. You’re on the right track – you just haven’t leveraged all the power available to you online.

One-to-Many Communication. On-on-One Feel.

Most websites are little more than electronic versions of Yellow Page advertising. For the most part, they don’t encourage interaction beyond the obligatory “Contact me for more information” plea. These sites don’t encourage trust any more than their print counterparts. They don’t give visitors the warm-and-fuzzy feeling that a face-to-face meeting would. But they can.

Searching for a local service provider online can be a daunting prospect, but even more daunting than the search is deciding which provider to use once you get to the page, especially since most websites promise the standard good service, competitive pricing and high quality.

So how does a business differentiate itself from the sea of competition? Web video makes this possible on a grand scale. Thanks to rapidly improving technology, it’s easier than ever to add that warm-and-fuzzy, face-to-face element to your site, replicate an in-person interview, and provide your visitors a chance to check you out before picking up the phone. With Web video, you can present an interview that addresses all the questions and concerns of potential clients. You can keep them on your site longer and give them insight into the “business behind the business.” In a way that wasn’t possible even a few years ago, business owners can now speak directly to their audiences and showcase their personalities and areas of expertise. This is especially helpful if you are a professional service provider.
Any business that relies on conveying trust-ability will benefit from this type of web marketing. Really, it’s one-to-many communication with a one-on-one feel. It’s the perfect ice breaker and an efficient means of generating the interest and trust needed to compel potential clients to make an appointment and do business.

A high-quality Web interview placed strategically on your site is a huge timesaver for you and prospective clients because you reach a wide audience in minimal time. Potential clients get the information they need to pre-qualify – and pre-sell – themselves before they call.

Online video delivers some of the best ROI of any advertising medium today and if set up properly, actually ranks higher than text now by the major search engines like Google. Short of spending valuable face time with a potential client (often times a poorly qualified potential client) there is simply no better way to forge a personal connection with them. With that in mind, here are 10 tips to help you get the most of your online video marketing efforts.
10 Tips for Making the Most of Online Video

1. Make Sure Your Video is Professionally Done.
This is an absolute must. The whole point here is to establish credibility and trust, but you’ll do the opposite with a poorly executed and produced video. Yes, many of the videos you find on sharing sites are mediocre at best, but that is changing rapidly as companies begin to see the value of promoting themselves in this manner. In fact, a recent Permission TV survey found that 67% of 400 hundred top executives intended to focus their online marketing efforts on video in 2009. The rush is coming – find a personable, engaging interviewer and a top notch production crew to really stand out.
2. Submit Your Video to as Many Outlets as Possible.
While YouTube is the clear leader here, there are many other video sharing sites worthy of consideration. Here are some others you won’t want to pass up:

• Google Video • Yahoo! Video • Daily Motion • MySpaceTV
• MetaCafe • Revver • Veoh • Blinkx • Break

3. Embed Your Video on the Front Page of Your Site.
Don’t hide what’s going to become one of your most effective selling tools on a dusty inside page. Get it out front. Customers and search engines will love you for it.

4. Find Out What Search Terms Your Potential Clients are Using and Put Them in Your Video’s Title.
If you don’t know what words clients in need of your services are typing into Google and other search engines, get professional help or use some of the resources featured on this page. Once you’ve identified these terms, use the most popular in your video’s title.

5. Make Your Tags and Descriptions SEO-friendly, too.
Most video sharing sites let you tag videos with keywords and post a short description, so get the most out of these by sprinkling in the search terms you’ve identified.

6. Don’t Forget Your Thumbnail.
A thumbnail is a still shot from your video that appears along with search results. Don’t waste this chance to present yourself in the best light possible – choose a key moment from your video, preferably one where you’re smiling as you speak with your interviewer.

7. Link Back to Your Site.
Put your URL near the top of your video’s description. You’ll get a higher search ranking and potential clients will quickly learn where to go for more information.

8. Interact With Your Viewers.
Most video sharing sites allow viewer comments. Use this option to answer questions, respond to comments, and further promote your business.

9. Consider a Pay-Per-Click Campaign.
Natural search engine optimization, while effective, takes time to bear fruit. In the meantime, you might want to jump start the process with a pay-per-click campaign that gives you a sponsored search listing. You can learn more about PPC advertising at:

• www.google.com/intl/en/ads
• sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketing
• advertising.microsoft.com/search-advertising

10. Add New Content Often.
Search engines look for it and so do potential clients. Keep your content fresh and up-to-date and keep visitors coming back for more.

With an ever-increasing stream of competition, it’s more important than ever to stand out from the crowd. These days standing out means maximizing your online presence and leveraging the technology to present the unique advantages of you and your firm. There’s no better way for a growth-oriented business to build a solid and secure future than by using effective and affordable online video.
Use these free resources to get a handle on the terms that potential clients are using to search for you right now.

• Wordtracker • Google AdWords • Keyword Discovery • KwMap • Google Trends

To learn how to increase search engine rankings and drive website traffic you need to understand the concepts that govern the way the search engines work.

Without an understanding of these principles and a system to incorporate them into everything you do online, you will not get the success you are seeking.

On the other hand, learn how to effectively utilize them and you will start dominating niches all over the Internet driving thousands of visitors to your site on a daily basis.

So what are the principles that rule search engine rankings and how do I improve mine? Here they are:

1. Relevancy
2. Popularity
3. Originality

Relevancy

Relevancy is something defined as having relationship to. For example if your website was about golf, related content would include information about such things as golf clubs, golf courses and golf lessons.

Content about anything other than the topic of the website or related topics would not score for relevancy, thereby having no chance of ranking in the search engines. Search engines check your site for relevancy.
You need to be right on topic for whatever it is you are targeting with the content you create. A final word of caution about relevancy: Relevancy alone will not rank your site. You could have the most highly relevant, best original content ever written posted at your site, however if there are no sites pointing to it, it will never rank in the search engines. Relevancy does not work without the concepts of popularity and original content.

How To Increase Search Engine Rankings and Drive Website Traffic with Relevant Content

The first step is to choose the keyword or keyword phrase you want your content to target. Let’s say you’re trying to get a higher ranking for this keyword phrase, the topic I am currently writing about, “Improve Search Engine Ranking”. Firstly, you would want to find what people are searching for and specifically target that keyword if you want your content to rank for that phrase.

Make sure you include the keyword phrase in the title of the article, for example your title could be “Strategies To Improve Search Engine Ranking”. Always try to put the keyword or keyword phrase as the first few words of the article title. Always remember to use the keyword phrase, several times throughout the article. Finally make sure your content remains 100% relevant to the keyword phrase.

Popularity

Popularity works together with relevancy to improve search engine rankings. Popularity is based on two key measures:

1. How many sites link to your site

A site’s popularity is measured firstly by the number of sites that directly link to your site.

To demonstrate popularity let’s take a quick look at YouTube. YouTube is one of the most popular sites on the Internet, Why? All links and embed codes taken from YouTube and embedded on other sites, whether that be Facebook, Myspace, a blog, a sales page or a website, creates an automatic link back to YouTube where the video is hosted. Every time someone shares a YouTube video a link is created.

With the number of videos shared Youtube gets thousands of new incoming links daily. This is one of the reasons why YouTube videos rank very highly on the search engines. Their site is super popular.
You need to be right on topic for whatever it is you are targeting with the content you create. A final word of caution about relevancy: Relevancy alone will not rank your site. You could have the most highly relevant, best original content ever written posted at your site, however if there are no sites pointing to it, it will never rank in the search engines. Relevancy does not work without the concepts of popularity and original content.

How To Increase Search Engine Rankings and Drive Website Traffic with Relevant Content

The first step is to choose the keyword or keyword phrase you want your content to target. Let’s say you’re trying to get a higher ranking for this keyword phrase, the topic I am currently writing about, “Improve Search Engine Ranking”. Firstly, you would want to find what people are searching for and specifically target that keyword if you want your content to rank for that phrase.

Make sure you include the keyword phrase in the title of the article, for example your title could be “Strategies To Improve Search Engine Ranking”. Always try to put the keyword or keyword phrase as the first few words of the article title. Always remember to use the keyword phrase, several times throughout the article. Finally make sure your content remains 100% relevant to the keyword phrase.

Popularity

Popularity works together with relevancy to improve search engine rankings. Popularity is based on two key measures:

1. How many sites link to your site

A site’s popularity is measured firstly by the number of sites that directly link to your site.

To demonstrate popularity let’s take a quick look at YouTube. YouTube is one of the most popular sites on the Internet, Why? All links and embed codes taken from YouTube and embedded on other sites, whether that be Facebook, Myspace, a blog, a sales page or a website, creates an automatic link back to YouTube where the video is hosted. Every time someone shares a YouTube video a link is created.

With the number of videos shared Youtube gets thousands of new incoming links daily. This is one of the reasons why YouTube videos rank very highly on the search engines. Their site is super popular.

In order to succeed and combat the competitive online world, you need to maintain a good reputation online. A good reputation does not only require a good website design but a lot more to build confidence, to grow sales and ultimately leads to better revenues and higher profitability.
In today’s Internet buzz nasty rumors, wrong opinions and incorrect news spread rapidly and if not taken timely action to handle the news properly, you may face a serious threat to your online business and credibility.

Here are some simple measures you can take to maintain your website’s reputation:

1. Respond to customers

Being open and responsive to customers is an important part of creating a positive impression and managing your website’s reputation. If someone asks you a question, answer it there or through e-mail. Be quick in addressing your customer issues before the word spreads.

2. Answer the negative comments humbly

Be real, not everyone is satisfied with your work and services. If these people are among the ones spreading negative comments about you for whatever reason like delayed service or unfriendly attitude, answer them instantly to terminate the issue right there!

Be very polite when putting your point of view in front of such people and you’ll sure succeed in saving your reputation. Answering negative remarks modestly can be a great way of turning a bad situation into positive one.

3. Create official online profiles

Create your own platform for users to share their experiences they’ve had with you. Create your own profiles and websites complete with the kind of information you actually want to be available about you. Let users communicate with each other and comment about your products or services, whether positive or negative.

4. Report stolen material from you

It’s very well possible that online competitors may steal material from your website to increase their ranking and traffic. This may lose your credibility among your users, making you “not-so-unique” in their eyes. To control such theft, you can report their site through strict action.

5. Write blogs

Writing blog posts are extremely effective in promoting your business. Through blog reviews and blog comments, you even increase your chance of getting high traffic volumes to your website.

If you or any of the experts in your business have important knowledge like instructions, guidelines, tips and trick that can be useful for the users, share them through writing blog posts, let say you write blog for “basic tips for web design”. This will greatly enhance your online reputation.

6. Optimize For Search Engines

Majority of the internet users accept results from Google searches or any other search engine as highly credible. Therefore, to maintain a good website reputation, don’t forget to optimize your website. You can consult professional search engine optimization services for this purpose.

7. Using the social media

Setting up social media networks in order to maintain your website’s online reputation is a great thought. To begin with, set up your profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace. Once you have your accounts setup, you will need to do the following things:

- Create a complete profile by putting all the information
- Engage and Interact with the members
- Monitor comments for both positive and negative remarks

You might have spend good time and money for your website design and building up your website’s good reputation, so it’s important not to let anyone drag it through the mud. Follow the above given tips to maintain your positive reputation among the online community.

At the end of the year, many businesses start to think about redesigning their tired old website to breathe some new life into it. You may even be in the midst of a website redesign right now. If so, the first thing is to make sure you hire a design and development company that knows how to build the infrastructure of the website in a search engine crawler–friendly manner.

Beyond that, you need to address a number of additional SEO tactics before you get too deep into your redesign. The reason you need to keep SEO front and center during this time is twofold: so that you do not lose your previous traffic, but also so that you can gain additional targeted search engine visitors when the new site goes live.

Here are 6 SEO redesign secrets your developer may not know…ignore them at your peril!

1. Creating Your SEO’d Site Architecture

Search engines look explicitly at how all your pages are linked together in order to determine their place within the site. Pages that are linked from every other page will be given more weight than those that are only linked from a few others. This is all considered a form of internal link popularity, or in Google language, internal PageRank.

Recommendation: During your redesign, don’t bury too deeply within the site any content that was previously bringing targeted search engine traffic. Ensure that any informational content that will be focused on the more competitive keyword phrases (for example, product and service pages) is high up in your site hierarchy.

In addition, all content contained in a specific category should be cross-linked via some sort of sub-navigation within that section.

2. Categorization and Avoiding Duplicate Content

When people are seeking information from a search engine, they usually have a question, a problem, or a need for specific information. The search queries they use at Google and the other engines reflect this. The more ways you can categorize your content for the various target markets you serve, the better.

Recommendation: Be sure that all top-level pages answer the potential searcher’s (your potential customers’) questions, and that it’s clear that your products and services can solve their problem. In addition, you also have to ensure that regardless of how someone found any piece of content on your site, they always end up at the same URL to avoid PageRank splitting and duplicate content issues.

For example, if a specific product can be classified as both a product and a service, it makes sense that it might be listed under both categories. However, the page (URL) that the potential customer eventually lands on, regardless of which category they started in, should always be the same.

3. New Content Management System and Changing URLS

If URLs must change in the redesign due to a new content management system or back-end coding, search engines may take some time to index the new URLs as well as give them the same weighting they gave the previous URLs due to URL age factors.

Recommendation: It’s critical to 301-redirect all old URLs to their relative counterpart within the newly designed website. This will pass the link popularity of the old URLs to the new ones quickly, as well as ensure that site visitors don’t receive 404-not-found errors.

This will be easier if the new URL naming is similar to the old one, because you can use automated methods. If URLs must change completely with no correlation to the names of the old URLs, and hand-redirects are required, you’ll want to at least redirect all the top-level pages, as well as those that you’re sure receive keyword traffic from search engines. But, ideally, every URL should be redirected if at all possible.

4. Coding of Navigation Menus

Links contained within the navigation of your website should be coded in a search engine–friendly manner so that they are visible and crawlable. Some DHTML and Flash menus are invisible to search engines, which causes the pages linked within them to not receive the internal link popularity they should receive.

Recommendation: Make sure all navigational menus are coded with CSS that is visible to search engines. In addition, avoid drop-down box links as the main form of navigation (CSS mouseovers are fine). You’ll also want to ensure that all content can be reached by hard-coded links – don’t force the user to go through any kind of search box menu because those are traditionally search engine unfriendly.

5. Custom HTML Elements

While some level of automation for titles, metas, headers, URLs, and alt attributes for images can be helpful, it’s critical that your new website’s content management system allow you to create custom descriptions for these as well.

Recommendation: Make sure the content management system has fields for custom title tags, meta descriptions, heading tags, etc. There should be no limit to the number of characters allowed in these fields either, because every page may need a different number of words and characters.

6. Session IDs and Other Tracking Links

It’s best not to use session IDs to track visitors, but if your system must use them, you’ll only need to feed the “clean” URLs to the search engine spiders – otherwise, they may get caught in an infinite loop, indexing the same content under multiple URLs.

You’ll also want to avoid any sort of campaign tracking links appended to URLs because these can split your link popularity by causing your content to be indexed under multiple URLs.

Recommendation: If this type of tracking is inherent in your system, use the canonical link element to maintain one URL for every page of content.

Don’t be surprised if your developer isn’t happy to receive some of these “secrets.” He or she may feel that their authority is being usurped or their creativity is being hindered. Just remember that it’s your website that you’re paying them to create in a way that will make you the most money possible. Let your developer know up-front that these things are non-negotiable. If they tell you that they can’t do any of the above, start looking around for a new developer – ASAP!

While there will always be a few unexpected bugs to work out when your site goes live, you won’t have to be afraid of losing your search engine visitors as long as you know what you’re doing. We’ve successfully helped many companies through this transition without any glitches. At the end of the process, there’s nothing like the feeling of having your beautiful new website launched. But more than that, there’s great comfort in knowing that the people looking for what you provide will continue to be able to easily find you in the search engines.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a particular discipline within web design, intended to increase the site’s rankings on a search engine. Since many users who search for a topic will select a site from the first page of results, or may stop after only a few pages, most web masters want their content to be displayed at the top of the page rankings.

There are a number of techniques that can be used to promote your web site within the search engine page rankings, and a number of pitfalls to avoid. Since the field has grown and evolved over the years, there is a body of knowledge and professional debate about it, as well as some long-standing myths and hold-overs from previous techniques that no longer work.

Pitfalls include:

- “Magic formulas” for keyword density
- Dictionary-like lists of keywords in page headers
- Filling tags and headers with irrelevant content
- Using invisible tags or keywords to “trick” the web crawler
- Using link exchanges or farms

Time-tested techniques include:

- Offering high-quality, unique content
- Becoming or utilizing recognized authorities
- Carefully soliciting links from high quality, professional contacts
- Structuring your site to be easy to crawl

Getting into SEO means sifting through all of the information available on how to optimize, determining which information is relevant and current, and then applying the best of it to your own project. Doing so cost effectively is critical.

You can chooseto do your own SEO on your web site, or contract the work out to professional SEO services. Whether you do the work yourself or hire it out should be a careful business decision, based on the current size and completion level of your site, the amount of user traffic it can handle, the amount of time and skill you can dedicate to the SEO project, and of course your budget.

If you choose to contract the service, do your research on firms that are professional and well respected. As with any other web-based service, caveat emptor. There are good firms and scam artists, clear terms and fine print. Be sure to check the SEO provider’s references, and ensure that you’re paying for site architecture and content changes, rather than simply for pay-per-click contracts. Avoid any that guarantee you a particular page ranking or sound too good to be true.

By far the best technique for increasing your search engine page ranking (SEPR) is simply offering high quality content that users find valuable. The more people value and respect your site, the more respected bloggers and sites will link to you, thus increasing your rankings.

Remember that the point of SEO is to drive users to your site. You should never find yourself sacrificing a user-friendly experience or the quality of your content for the sake of the search engine bots. Search engines are themselves web sites that must offer a high quality experience to their users, so they will heavily penalize sites that use technical “tricks” that degrade their own user experience. More importantly, a high page ranking is irrelevant without a good web site that keeps users coming back.

Several small & mid size businesses contact us daily for SEO consultation and helping their websites rank well on search engines. One common question we always hear is:
“Where and how do I start my SEO Campaign from?”
A couple of points to note before we start -
We are assuming that you already have the domain name because finding a good domain name would be a separate topic.
Here are some of the most important steps that you can yourself take care of before going to any SEO company to manage your search engine marketing campaign.

1. Find your targeted keywords
The first and most important step is to determine what are the most important keywords for which you want your website to appear on search engines? You know your business more than anyone else. You know your target audience. So find out 10 phrases which you think that your prospective customers will search for.

2. Set the title of your website pages right
After you have decided on your keywords, the next step is to set them up properly. The title of your web page is the very first thing that any search engine crawler will read and take as a factor to rank your website. Your homepage title should contain your targeted keyword. All the other pages of your website should have title related to the content of that respective page. For e.g., the title of the registration page should be “Registration”. Keep in mind that you are not promoting your “registration” page. The idea is to “set things right”.

3. Set up meta keywords and description
Though Google has said they do not read meta tags content we still advise to put your targeted keywords in meta name=”keywords”/ field and one line description of your website in meta name=”description”/ field in your header tags. Many other search engines will still read them and Google won’t give you negative marks for that.

4. Unique content for the home page
Your website’s homepage should have a unique content describing your business. This introductory text should have the phrases that are in the title of the page. Experts say that you should use your targeted keyword 2-3 times in every 200 words so as to not get caught up for keyword stuffing. If possible, put your local business address and phone number on home page & contact us page to get noticed on “local business results” on Google.

5. Business Blog
Google loves a blog and so do the other search engines. Having a business blog pays – and this is something you should always remember. Whatever business you have, you must write 1-2 posts every week about your business. The articles can be about an industry news, a website update, a new recruit in your company – anything that relates in some way or the other to your business.
We recommend using wordpress because they are easy to set up and the come up with various SEO Plugins that help in optimizing your blog for search engine rankings.

6. Install Web Analytics
Once your website is up, you would definitely want to monitor your traffic. Any analytics software will show you how many visitors come to your website daily, where are they coming from and which keywords do they use on search engines to get on to your website. These are the most important metrics.
We suggest using Google Analytics!

7. Monitor your website rankings
Of course you are just starting your campaign. You might not be in top 100 on Google but sooner or later if you do the right things at the right time, you will find yourself in top 10 for that elite group of your targeted keywords.
We, at KPMRS, offer this service for free. You can register your website with your targeted keywords and we will monitor your rankings on daily basis. You can be rest assure to get notified by email as soon as your rank has changed for Google, Yahoo or Bing. This will even help you track the work done by whichever SEO company you have chosen for your campaign.

8. Setup business profiles on social media websites
Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious are some of the buzz words today in social media industry. Setting up your business profile on these & similar websites are must for a starter. Maintaining & optimizing them is again a different topic of discussion about which we will soon post here.
We hope that you found this list a good starting point to help you set up your SEO Campaign. We also advise our clients to educate themselves by spending 30 minutes daily in reading latest news in the SEO world. You may not be professionals but you sure don’t want to appear dumb when you talk to a SEO Company. Official blogs of Google, Bing, & Yahoo are good starting point but there are hundreds of freelance bloggers that can provide really valuable information as well a few ones that we love
http://www.addme.com (Highly Recommended)

http://www.dailyseoblog.com

http://www.seo-theory.com

http://www.seomoz.org

http://www.webmasterworld.com (Highly Recommended)

Well, we have finished our part. Time for you now to add more points which you think would be useful for a beginner in the SEO world.

Site Map Making Using Google Maps
A sitemap of a website is similar to the table of contents of a book. Sitemaps are important because it guides web surfers to the particular part of the website they have a point of interest in. With it they would save time following links and get right to the point instead.

Sitemaps are also where search engines look at if somebody is looking for a particular keyword or phrase. If you have a site map, you can most likely be searched.

Creating a sitemap, now with software technology surging in, is relatively easier than before. You need not be a programming guru to be one. All need is a notepad, a program editor, and some patience. Here’s how you do it:

Create the listing on a notepad.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a notepad. Any word processing program will do. First off, make sure to type in all the parts and pieces of your website. Include all pages and all links you have. Create it as if you listing the contents of your book. Make a draft first. You’re sure no to miss something out this way.

Create a new page for your sitemap.

You can insert the sitemap on your website on one of its pages or you can create an entirely different page for it. Using your notepad, incorporate all tags necessary to it to make another webpage. Open up your website creator program and tag your sitemap using it. If you have created your website on your own, this will be easy for you.

Create a link for the sitemap.

You won’t be able to view the sitemap if you won’t put a link for it, of course. Create the link on the front page of your website so that visitors can view it right away and be directed appropriately.

Check your work.

It is important to validate the functionality of the links you created on the sitemap. Test each and every one in there and if you get an error, be sure to fix it accurately. Run throughevery single page to make sure that all are accounted for.

Upload your work.

Place the sitemap now on your live browser and double check it. It should function as smoothly as the dry run. Error should be minimal at this stage since you already have verified it locally.

The steps provided herewith is the manual way of creating a sitemap. These days, if you search hard enough on the web, you will find online programs that will do all these work for you. All you have to do it type in the URL or the link of your website and they will create the sitemap with click of a button.

Of course that method is generic. All of you who have created their sitemap that way will have an end product that is all the same, plus there’s that possibility that something else will be inserted in there too. Then again, the process is less taxing and way, way simpler.

But if you want a more personalized output, and you are pretty good with computers and programming yourself, better make one of your own. And since you made your website anyway, creating sitemap is just like creating any other page on the website. Other than you’ll know for sure the links are accurate, you can organize the links the way you prefer it to be. Major parts of the site are emphasized compared to less significant. This is important especially if you are selling products or offering services online.

Sitemap is vital to a website. People search the web a lot for something. If your website has what that particular person is looking for, and your sitemap reports it, then you have a new customer looking at your items. Not only that, they will see some other things up for sale that they might be interested in as well.

Sitemaps, be it generated by a program automatically or you made it yourself, presents the same purpose. That is to lead your visitors to where they’re likely headed, and for you to be seen on the World Wide Web through search spiders. So with these, make sure your website has a sitemap of its own, lest make one.

1. eBay Wants its Sellers Back

This article received the most commentary by far from WebProNews readers out of every article we produced this year.

2. Top 10 Frustrations for eBay Sellers

Another article on a related subject was also discussed frequently.
3. Does DMOZ Still Have a Place in Search?

Indicating that DMOZ is still definitely a topic worthy of discussion, DMOZ’s value was debated thoroughly in the comments on this article.

4. Do You Respect DMOZ After 11 Years?

DMOZ was also a hot topic after the company had its 11th birthday. It was quite interesting to find out what people thought after 11 years of the directory’s existence.

5. eBay Competitor Bonanzle Continues Big-Time Growth

As was made clear in a number of eBay articles we ran, a lot of users of that site were not very happy. Competitors took advantage. This was a look at the success of one competitor in particular.

6. House Says Bloggers Don’t Count As Journalists

The bloggers vs. journalists debate is always a hot one. Of course when the government gets involved with that debate, some heavy commentary will ensue.

7. Apple Fans Respond To The “Droid Does” Advertising Campaign

Apple fans love to talk. So do Apple haters. That point was very clear in the comments we received on this article.

8. Netbooks: Moving in Right Next Door to Useless

Mike ruffled some feathers with his criticism of the Netbook phenomenon. Although he certainly had plenty who agreed with his views.

9. Can eBay Win Back Sellers with a Shift in Focus?

eBay sparked some interest yet again when it announced its focus on the “secondary market”.
10. eBay Unleashes Changes Galore for Sellers

Any time eBay makes changes that affect sellers, you can pretty much guarantee that people are going to talk.

11. Is MySpace Toast?

MySpace’s future is discussed as Facebook takes over as the dominant social network.

12. Google: Page Speed May Become a Ranking Factor in 2010

Google’s Matt Cutts dropped a hint that page speed may be considered as a ranking factor by the search engine soon. Some think this is a great idea, others think it’s horrible.

13. The AP’s Desperate Attempt To Outlaw Search Engine Links

A discussion about the Associated Press and fair use of content.
14. Murdoch On Blocking Search Engines: “I Think We Will”

News Corp. CEO Murdoch said some interesting things about how it plans to distribute its content in the future. This is still a hot topic.

15. Shocker: Facebookers Not Happy With Redesign

I’m sure you recall the big Facebook redesign. A lot of people are still bitter about it.

Looking back at some of these articles, it’s hard to believe they’ve all come from just this year. It’s amazing how much has happened in search, e-commerce, and social media. The rate at which everything changes and evolves is really quite astounding. I guess that can be attributed to the real-time nature in which we consume information now, and the sheer amount of content that is poured onto the web every minute of every day.