First off you might not know what a Google Sitemap or a XML sitemap is.

This is a file that you put on your site that is only for the search engine spiders it is not seen by your visitors.

This file can get you indexed very quickly with Google, MSN, Yahoo! and Ask because it lists all the pages on your site and how often they are modified. This makes the search engines happy because they don’t have to work as hard to get all your listings.

This is a great tool in the SEO wars, it lets you get your pages indexed in no time and let’s face it you can’t do well in the search engines unless you are indexed.

There are a couple of free programs that you can use to create your sitemaps, if you have a WordPress blog you can use a plugin called Google XML Sitemap from Arne Brachhold that will automatically create your sitemap and notify the search engines, if your site isn’t on WordPress you can use a program called GSite Crawler to create and upload your XML sitemap.

I do highly recommend that you have a XML sitemap for your site because it WILL help you get your content indexed and move you up the search engines. With that said…

YOUR XML SITEMAP CAN BE HURTING YOUR RANKING!

If you have errors in your sitemap it can actually hurt your rankings with Google, most of the time when people think about errors they figure the code in the sitemap must be the cause but both the programs listed above will create your sitemap with perfect code but you can still have errors as far as Google is concerned.

The reason for this is because Google not only holds your sitemap to the strict XML code but it also holds your site to Google’s policies for indexing, such as 404 error (missing pages) which a lot of people know about but what a lot of people don’t know about is that you will also get errors if you violate their redirect policy on your site.

Google doesn’t like redirects that never become visible to the viewer. Things like cloaked affiliate links and sales links and these will create an error in your sitemap. This only applies if you have the links actually in your sitemap, if they are coming from your site such as www.mysite.com/recommends/buythis.html then they will probably be in your sitemap. This is a common cloaking technique for affiliate links.

Sales links can also create this, for example on one of my sites I use DownLoad Guard to handle the sales and download protection for my products. The script creates a link for the purchase that goes to the script and then redirects the customer to ClickBank to purchase the product. The viewer never sees the page they are clicking on.

While there is nothing nefarious about this link Google still sees it as a violation of their policy and it will create an error in your sitemap file and this can get you knocked down in the listings.

To fix this you can simply put a no follow tag in the link you are using.

HOW DO YOU KNOW IF YOU HAVE ERROR IN YOUR XML SITEMAP?

This is actually pretty easy to do. Just signup at Google Webmaster Tools and register all your sites that have XML sitemaps. If they see an error they will mark it as a warning and even tell you what the problem is.

Once you have verified all your sites wait a couple of days and log in to see if you have any errors. If you see a warning beside any of the sites click on it and it will tell you the error if it is too many redirects start using the no follow tag on those links or remove the links from your sitemap.

If you would be interested in me making a video showing you how to set up your Google Account for sitemaps and how to fix some of the errors let me know by leaving a comment below.

Hello everybody! This is just a test post. I am playing with a new browser called Flock that has a built in blog editor and I wanted to see how well it works.

For the picture I just dragged and dropped it into the blog editor and like magic it appeared. So that it pretty cool.

The flock browser runs off the same engine as Firefox and it is designed as the “Social Browser” It will take a little while to get used to but so far it looks promising.

Now I am playing with the editor to see how the text can be edited on the fly.

So now I will try some big text

And some Red Text

Now some list

1. numbered list 1
2. numbered list 2
   1. sublist 1
   2. sublist 3
3. numbered list 3

• bulleted list 1
• bulleted list 2
  • bulleted sublist 1
  • bulleted sublist 2
• bulleted list 3

Well I like the way it handles lists much better then the editor built into wordpress.

Still more to learn if you are interested you can get the browser at:

www.Flock.com

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: Flock, Browser

First of for those of you that don’t know what an autoresponder is a definition.

An autoresponder is a system that automatically signs someone up on your list and sends them emails. Boy that sounds a lot like spamming.

Now to be clear I am talking about follow up autoresponders. These can send out a series of message set to go out every day, every other day or whenever you choose. The onetime autoresponders that will send out the same message every time an email is received at that email address is a little different. These are only good if you have changed your email address or if you are on vacation or if you have some other information that needs to be delivered every time someone sends an email to that email address.

There are basically two types of follow up autoresponders.

A service where you will login to their website and set up your autoresponder and a script that you will install on your site that will send out emails for you.

Both of these will let you set up a follow up email sequence, for example if you wanted to send out a course on getting traffic you could put in four or five messages in the series and have them sent out every day or every other day to everybody that signs up. Everybody that signs up gets all the follow up messages no matter when they sign up.

Both of these will let you do broadcast emails. A broadcast email is when you want to send an email to your entire list today or possibly schedule it for sometime in the future but it is only sent once and if someone joins your list after it is sent they won’t ever see it.

What is the difference between having your own autoresponder on your site and using a service?

I won’t lie to you here, I used my own on my site to start out because it is cheaper. With that said I had my site shut down with my first broadcast email because I was accused of spam complaints. Not much fun.

Yes, they were double optin subscribers but they forgot they subscribed and I didn’t remind them in the email why they were getting the email. Since then I have been a firm believer in paying for the monthly services. Right now I am using Aweber and any spam complaints go to them and my site doesn’t get affected by them.

Yes, I might be a little tainted by my previous experience, OK a lot tainted. But if you ever had to try to get a site back up after it has been shut down due to spam complaints, you would be tainted too. The worse part about it is even if you get your site back up, you have been added to all the spam filters and none of your email will get through. I spent months trying to get this straightened out and never did get it fixed. I ended up with a new domain name and no list.

Besides the fact that you will have to ward off all the spam complaints (from double optin subscribers) there are other things that you should be doing to make sure your emails are getting through from your site. I don’t have all the things but here are a few:

• Your site needs to have its own IP Address. On a shared IP address (common with most hosting packages) you will end up being caught in the spam filters if anyone that shares that IP address with you is accused of spam. Great isn’t it. Because the guy next door does something wrong you get punished.
• You will need to have a Reverse DNS set up for your site. This isn’t that big of a problem if you have your own IP address. Just ask your host to set it up for you.
• You will need an SPF file. I am not even sure what this is but you need it if you are going to be sending a lot of emails. Again your hosting service provider should be able to take care of this for you.
• You need to constantly make sure your site is whitelisted by the major providers like AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, etc. They each have their own way of doing this.
• You need to make sure that you can send as many emails as you like through your site. Most hosting services put a cap on how many emails you can send through your site. This is usually limited to 500 an hour or something like that. Which is fine if you have a small list but if you have a list of 10,000 it will never get sent.

OR

You can pay a service to do it all of this for you.

There are two major services out there that have been doing this for years and know how to get it done. They are Aweber (the one I use) and GetResponse of course there are a bunch of other services out there but these two have the track records for deliverability and ease of use that I can vouch for and I am not sure of any of the others.

The decision is yours, of course, but in this day and again when AOL has a button on every email that says, “This is Spam” and email delivery rates are dropping for all that do it themselves how much time and effort do you want to spend trying to get your emails through?

To me this is one place you should definitely outsource. Isn’t all the work the services do to get your email delivered worth $20.00 per month? Yes I know you will pay more if you list grows but if you have a list of over 10,000 and you can’t make $20 per month there is something wrong there.