eComm Tips

If you’re going to be involved online, you should probably learn some basic HTML. I know that I talked about this is a previous post as well, but this time I want to give you some specific examples. Specifically, I want to go over the tags that you should know for article submissions.

Most of the article directories that I’ve dealt with only have basic text editors for you to enter your article into. Well, if you want your article to have a little formatting, you will have to do all of that stuff manually. Whether it be adding stuff in bold, italics or whatever, you’ll have to do it the old fashioned way. So here are some of those basic tags and how to use them.

Bold

<strong>text to be bolded</strong>

Italics

<em>text to be italicized</em>

Unordered List

An unordered list is one that has bullet points, not numbers. So to start one, you have to use <ul>. Then you’ll have your list of items. Before each item, you put the tag <li>, then after each item you put </li>. Once you are done with the whole list, put the tag </ul> to end the list.

Example:

• Item 1
• Item 2

Ordered List

An ordered list is a list with numbers in order next to each item. You do these the same as the unordered list, only you need to open the list with <ol> and close the list with </ol>.

Example:

1. Item 1
2. Item 2

Hyperlinks

For information on creating hyperlinks, I’m going to refer you to a post I did previously that will cover it in more detail:
Creating Links for Article Submissions

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One question that I get a lot is, “How do I create a link in my article submissions?” Most article directories do not use a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, meaning that you have to actually put in HTML code in order to create a link for your article. So, here is the basic idea of what to do.

1- Write Out Your Author Bio

I would recommend that before you even consider creating any links for your article, you should write the author bio first. This is the final paragraph, sometimes called the “Resource Box” where you put in the little blurb about yourself or your site. Make sure that you use 1-2 of your keyword phrases in this bio so you can turn them into links.

2- Decide Which Page You’re Going to Link to

When you’re doing article submissions, it is a good idea to do some deep linking whenever appropriate. Deep linking is when you link to another page within the site rather than just the home page. This helps you to create a good link popularity for the whole site, not just the home page (I’ll probably talk about this more in a future post).

So once you’ve chosen your 1-2 keyword phrases, go to your site and grab the URL (address) of the pages that are most appropriate for you to link to with those phrases.

3- Create the Link

To create the link you’re going to need a little bit of HTML code. Let’s do an example and say that I am going to create a link for the keyword phrase ‘website marketing’, and I’m going to link it to http://www.ecommtips.com. I’ll break the code down into two parts: what goes before the phrase and what goes after the phrase.

Before the Phrase
What you need to put before the phrase is this: <a href=”http://www.ecommtips.com”> but of course you would replace it with your own address.

After the Phrase
After the phrase you would put this: </a>

So, once it’s all said and done, the code to create a hyperlink will look like this: <a href=”http://www.ecommtips.com”>website marketing</a> when you insert it into the “Author Bio” or “Resource Box.”  But, when the article is published it will look like this: website marketing.

There you go! That’s all you need to do to create a hyperlink for an article submission!

Code Variations

One thing I’ve learned from submitting to different article directories is that different directories like to see the code slightly differently sometimes. Here are some variations:

<a href=”http://www.ecommtips.com”>
<a href=http://www.ecommtips.com>

Notice that the second one has not quotation marks around the address. This is the way that ArticleDashboard.com prefers it. Just use trial and error. The variation I showed you in the original example is the more common one, but every now and then you may need to use this variation.

Happy Linking!

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In my last post I gave you some guidelines for coming up with domain names. What I recommend to most people is that you should come up with 15-20 different names that you like, then check the availability all at once. On average you’ll probably end up with 4-5 that are still available. But sometimes it’s hard to come up with that many names on your own. That’s where DomainsBot.com comes in!

DomainsBot is a cool little tool that can help you come up with more domain names than you could think of on your own. Granted, a lot of them aren’t very good, but it can at least help you get started or help you add to your list. Here’s what their home page looks like:

First thing you want to do when you get to DomainsBot is type in 2-3 words that you think you would want to have in your domain name. As you’re typing, you’ll see a little box start to appear below the search box. You can ignore this box. Just click on “Search” when you’re typed in the words you’re typing. That will take you to the search results. Before we start going through this list, we need to filter the list a little bit. So if you scroll down the right hand side a little bit you’ll see a blue area called LiveBot. Here’s what the first part will look like:

One thing with DomainsBot that can be helpful is they don’t just look for the phrase that you typed in, but they also look for synonyms of those words as well. Sometimes you’ll get a bunch of synonyms, sometimes you’ll only get a few. Look through the list and decide if you really need any of these. Most of the time I just delete all of them. To delete them, just click on the box next to the word and then hit “Delete Synonym” at the bottom of each section.

After that we need to filter the View Only area of LiveBot. Here’s what it looks like so you can make sure you’re looking at the right thing:

For this area, with the Extensions we only want to worry about the .com. In the Status section we only care about what’s available, and in the Include section you can un-check everything (unless you really want to have bad words in your domain name LOL). Then click on “Update Results” and it will filter the list for you.

Once you’ve filtered the list, go through it and write down any of the domain names that interest you. One other thing I’ve found is that when DomainsBot says that a name is available, its accurate about 95% of the time. The registrar has the final say.

So that’s DomainsBot! Great little tool for coming up with domain names if you get stumped!

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In part 5 of this Google Sitemaps Series, I’m going to show you how to get even more information from the Links section of Google Sitemaps. But, in order for you to be able to do this, you have to be using the Firefox browser. If you don’t have the Firefox internet browser, use this link to download it for free: Firefox.

Once you have the Firefox browser installed, we need to add a new plug-in to it and do a little set up. Specifically, we need to install the Greasemonkey plug-in, which you can get here: Greasemonkey. Greasemonkey is a plug-in for Firefox that allows you to customize the way a web page shows up by using a little javascript. There are a lot of little scripts that you can use with Greasemonkey, but to get more information from Google Sitemaps we need the following script added to Greasemonkey: External Links ++. Once you’re on this page, just click on “Install Script” and add it to your Greasemonkey. You might have to restart your browser at this point as well to make sure that everything has been installed properly.

If it isn’t already, go ahead and turn Greasemonkey on by clicking on the little monkey logo at the bottom right hand corner of your browser. Here’s an example of what it should look like when enabled:

Ok, now we’re ready to see what this baby can do for you. Go ahead and log in to your Google Sitemaps account, click on the site you want to look at, and then go to the Links area. The first thing you’ll see is the pages that Google has found links going to. Go ahead and click on one of these pages. If Greasemonkey is NOT enabled, here’s an example of what you’ll see:

If Greasemonkey IS enabled, you’ll see something like this:

See the additional information? Now, instead of just seeing where the link is located you can also see what the PR of the page is, and also what phrase was used for the anchor text on the page. If the information is in red then Greasemonkey wasn’t able to find the link on the page. Sometimes you’ll also see the extra info in an orange font with a strike-through. This means that the link was found with the anchor text, but the link has a no follow attribute to it (this means that the search engines won’t follow it to your page).

So how do we use this information? Well, now when you log into your Google Sitemaps account you can see what links are being recognized by Google, but you can also see which of these links are most valid, get an idea of what the PR of the pages linking to you is, and you can also make sure that most of your links are using good anchor text.

That concludes this series about Google Sitemaps. I really do hope that you find it useful! Until next time…

This post is part of a 5 Part Series. Below are links to the other parts of the series:
Google Sitemaps Series Part 1 - Creating the Account
Google Sitemaps Series Part 2 - Creating the Sitemap
Google Sitemaps Series Part 3 - Adding Your Sitemap to Google
Google Sitemaps Series Part 4 - What You Can Learn From Google Sitemaps Data

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On to Part 4 of this series about Google Sitemaps. Today I want to explore with you a little bit about what you can learn from the information provided by Google Sitemaps. Honestly, a lot of the stuff in this program is nice to know, but you don’t need to spend a lot of time with it. So we’re going to focus on the things that I feel are probably most important, as well as a few things that people are always asking me about.

So, go log into your Google Sitemaps account. Hopefully by this time your site has been verified. Unless your site is verified you won’t be able to see the additional information that we’ll be looking at today. So get that done first, then come back to this step.

When you first log in, you’ll be on the Dashboard. Click on the site that you’ve verified. By the way, you can have multiple sites in the same account.

We’ll go over the information in this post based on the tabs in Google Sitemaps. So here’s the first one:

Diagnostic

The first page you’ll see after clicking on your site name is the Summary. We can grab a few interesting bits of information from this. For example, it will tell you the last time that the Googlebot visited your page. Sometimes it’s nice to know how often your site is being re-indexed. There is a definite correlation between Page Rank and how often your site is crawled. So if you want to see this date become more frequent, you have to get your Page Rank up. It also helps if your site is always adding new content. A search engine has little reason to come back and keep crawling a static website.

Also on this page you’ll see information about Web crawl errors. This is one part that people ask me about all of the time. From time to time you’ll see pages showing up in the “Not Found” category. You can click on this link and see what pages weren’t found. The funny thing is that whenever I go to this page I’ll see pages they are listing that I know for a fact do not exist in my site. So, I’ve either incorrectly entered a URL somewhere on my site, or they have a glitch in their crawl. In my experience, it’s usually nothing to worry about and is a glitch with the crawler.

The rest of the information in this section I really don’t look at very often. It’s interesting and all, but let’s move on to some stuff that is a little more informative and helpful.

Statistics

The statistics section has several different sub-sections that give us some good information about our site and its performance on Google. At this point though I do need to mention something: it seems that Google doesn’t always keep this information up to date. Use it as an indicator to get an idea, but you probably shouldn’t swear by it 100%.

Anyway, the different sub-sections are Crawl Stats, Query Stats, Page Analysis, and Index Stats. Let’s go through these and talk about how they can be helpful.

Crawl Stats - No big thing here, it tells you the general PR of your pages.

Query Stats - This is the most useful sub-section. Query Stats will give you a 7 day average of some of your top phrases that are bringing your site up in the queries, plus the 7 day average ranking. It will also give you a second table that shows you the top query clicks over the last 7 days as well. If you’re really curious, you can also break this information down by different locations as well.

Page Analysis - This one is also no biggie, but it does show you what phrases Googlebot is finding as links out there. It also shows you what phrases Googlebot is picking up on your pages as well. You can reference this to your keyword density to make sure you’re using your phrases enough so that they’re getting picked up.

Index Stats - This gives you a list of things you can actually check on the Google search engine anyway. Its good to know the syntax for these.

Links

Now we’re getting to the good stuff, and in my opinion the biggest reason to even use Google Sitemaps in the first place! This is where you can see what links Google has picked up. If you remember what we did on Yahoo! a few posts ago, this is Google’s version. Here’s a link to that post just in case: How to Check Backlinks on Yahoo!

The cool thing about this part of Google Sitemaps is you can see where the links are coming from for individual pages, not just the whole site in general. Its important that you have links going to more than just the home page so that we’re developing link popularity for the whole site, not just the home page all of the time. In part 5 of this series I’ll show you how we can get even more out of the information in this section.

We’re not going to worry about the last tab, Sitemaps, because we already hit on this one in the previous post. This is where you submit and re-submit your sitemap.

Ok, so that does it for part 4 of this series. In part 5 I’ll show you a fun way that you can hack into this program and get even more information out of it. Until then, have fun!

This post is part of a 5 Part Series. Below are links to the other parts of the series:
Google Sitemaps Series Part 1 - Creating the Account
Google Sitemaps Series Part 2 - Creating the Sitemap
Google Sitemaps Series Part 3 - Adding Your Sitemap to Google
Google Sitemaps Series Part 5 - Getting More Information

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Today we will be continuing on with the series about how to setup Google Sitemaps and how to add the sitemap that you created to your Google account. So first things first, go login to your Google account at www.google.com/sitemaps. This will redirect you to the right page in Google for setting up your sitemap.

Once you’ve logged in you should see a box like the one below where you can add a site to your Google account. Go ahead and type in the basic address of the site that you’re working with into this box and click on “Add Site”. You can type in either just the domain name (www.website.com) or the full URL (http://www.website.com), it doesn’t matter which you do.

Once you’ve entered your site, you’ll be taken into an area called Summary. This page will tell you things like when the Googlebot last visited your site and if you site has been indexed by Google. Our next step is to verify that we are the owner of the site and also submit our sitemap. You should see a link on the page that will take you to the verification page.

To verify your site, you have two different options. Really they just want you to prove that you are the owner of the site before they start giving you any additional information. Personally, I rather like that they make you do this, it makes it harder for my competition to see what I’m up to! Your two options are to either add a special meta tag to your home page or upload a special file to your site. They’ll give you the details. Go through the instructions, find out which one is the best for you, and git’r done!

Once you’ve started the verification process you can also go ahead and submit a sitemap to the program as well. Near the top of the page you’ll see the navigation. You want to click on the button that says “Sitemaps”.

On this next page, right in the middle it will have a link that says “Add a Sitemap”. Click on this link.

Now you’ll be on a page that gives you a drop-down menu to choose the type of sitemap that you will be linking to Google. Choose “Add General Web Sitemap”. Next follow the steps that are listed on the page. We covered the first and second steps in the last post, which was to create the sitemap. Please go back to this step if you missed it. In step 3 you just have to put in the URL where you sitemap is located, so for example “http://www.website.com/sitemap.xml”. Then click on the button that says “Add Web Sitemap” and you’re done! They’ll let you know if there were any errors.

Tomorrow I’ll do part 4 of this series. In part 4 we’ll take a look at what information you can gather from the Google Sitemaps program and how to use it. Then next I’ll have part 5 where I’ll show you how to hack this information and get even more out of it. Should be fun!

This post is part of a 5 Part Series. Below are links to the other parts of the series:
Google Sitemaps Series Part 1 - Creating the Account
Google Sitemaps Series Part 2 - Creating the Sitemap
Google Sitemaps Series Part 4 - What You Can Learn From Google Sitemaps Data
Google Sitemaps Series Part 5 - Getting More Information

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