Submit your website’s updated information to Google using Google Sitemap Tool

Google unveil a very innovative tool to allow webmaster submit their site’s changes (new links, new content, etc) to Google’s search database using their Google Sitemap service

This service allows a webmaster to manage and submit all the sites he/she operates under a single Google account.

I am not a big fan of search engine submission. However, Google seems to have put in a lot of valuable statistic and management features into this new service – Google Webmaster Tools. And Google Sitemap is among one of them.

So it is worth to take a look.

Particularly, you can use a XML formatted Google Sitemap File to notify and update Google any changes of your site’s content.

If you are using WordPress like this Blog, you can use the plugin here to generate the Sitemap file:

If you are using Joomla (my favorite Content Management Script), you can use Joomap as a new component to aid the auto-generation of the sitemap xml file.

If you use OSCommerce, you cannot miss this one

http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,3226

There are quite a lot of available third party solutions of sitemap generation available at this link
http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html

I have just started to test and verify the effectiveness of this service. I’ll be using Joomap and WordPress Sitemap generator for the trials. Stay tuned with me for my update on this service.

Over Optimization – SEO guys – Be Careful!

Webmasters who have been doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should know about the importance of inbound links to their websites. People come to build inbound links by participating in link exchange programme or buying inbound links from websites of high page rank.

It helps boosting your page rank if you plan and carry out diligently the tedious tasks of link building for your website. But one thing you have to be careful not to ruin your good work. It is: you have to be careful about choosing the anchor text (or called link text) that the sites have put in to describe the link to your site.

Why? It is because search engines start to analyze those link texts and decide if those links are naturally built or artificially built.

How? Naturally build link text should vary in its description for every link that points to your site. Artificially built link text is not. A web master could easily negotiate and work with a dozen web masters requesting them to place a link to his/her website with exactly the same description in their link text.

Search Engine works in picking up this clue now. If it notices that there are exact wordings or descriptions in most of the links to your website, it could trigger its link discount algorithm to reduce the metric of page rank contribution of those links. The worst of all, if it concludes you are undergoing some search engine spamming tactics, your site could be de-listed from its listing forever.

So be careful when you setup your website link exchange page. When you invite other webmasters to exchange link with your site, you’d better advise each of them to use different link text in the links that point to your site.

Actually the mutually two-way link exchange tactic is losing its value as more and more webmasters are doing the similar thing. Search Engines are discounting the values of those mutually linked websites’ inbound links. Think about other tactics like buying inbound links and article submission with resource box of your websites.

Try this service to learn about the inbound links’ anchor text to your website.

PageRank Toolbar from Google:
It returns page ranking rated by Google when you visit a particular website’s page
http://toolbar.google.com

Alexa Toolbar from Alexa.com
It returns the traffic ranking of a particular website you visit
http://download.alexa.com/index.cgi

Alex does not offer toolbar compatible with Firefox. If you use Firefox, please refer to their information page to install 3rd party Alexa toolbarfor Firefox:
http://www.alexa.com/site/help/?index=127

Get used to using them in your web browsing. You’ll soon get yourself the power to distinguish good sites from bad ones.

Every web master is searching for good content to be put on their websites. Why? It is because content is the life blood of websites. Without good content, web surfers turn away from you to other competing websites. Hence, you lose in the uphill battle with other webmasters competing in the same niche markets you are in.

Small players are playing the hard game to keep this up. But there are no exception to big players.

Google has been putting much effort doing this for the past few years. It has been indexing and digitalizing a lot of scholastic material and books that belong to public domains. Last week, it moved one more step ahead by signing University of California to digitalize and put all its libraries’ books spanning over 10 campuses online.

I’m a bit doubtful whether University of California has the rights to the books hosted in its libraries to be shared with Google. Though Google has spent a lot of effort to gain publishers’ consent to the books they want to get the content listed in Google. (Refer to the news http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3527296)

The lesson learned here is even big player in the Internet is struggling for content. Google truly understands this. It has to put in continuous effort to wider its scope of content to feed the hungry web surfers who are looking for content when they put up the search on Google’s websites.

So the number one principle in getting ranked higher in your everyday search engine tactic is: Build Content.
If you don’t know what public domain is. Refer to the post here:

Get 15 public domain books free of charge

Best Content Building,

Damen

Related news:

http://www.internetnews.com/xSP/article.php/3625571

There is a new trick to earn money by Google is to join Google’s Adwords program and put up advertising with keywords with low bid. If People click on those advertisements, they are brought to the landing page full of Google’s Adsense advertisement with keywords with higher bid. In this way, the advertiser can earn the advertising dollars by the difference in the bidding price of keywords.

This is called Click Arbitrage.

When I first learnt this strategy, the immediate thought is this is theoretically workable but in the long run, it is going to end in dismay. Google eventually would deal with it.

Search Engine is not stupid and its strategy changes every day. And Google is rich and very profitable. It has a pool of good people working for it. It will exhaust all of its resources to combat people tricking the system. And Click Arbitrage is definitely one of them.

When I read the news here in the Inside Adwords Blog by Google, I think it is already dealing with it. Google is now trying to measure the quality of Google’s advertisers’ landing page to determine the bidding value of the keywords they choose to advertise. If the landing page’s quality is considered to be poor, the advertiser has to pay a higher bidding value for the keywords.

This is not surprising. What surprises me is why not Google simply bans the advertisers who put up a landing page full of Adsense’s advertisements? I guess one of the main reasons is Google does care about their customers – they are their revenue sources. Therefore unless the problem deteriorates, they do not take this final measure.

But God knows, it might happen in future.

My number one principle in doing Search Engine Optimization  is: Don’t do something to trick the search engines because even those strategies work for a while, they won’t work for long. You are going to pay for the price sooner or later.