All the three search engine Google, Yahoo and MSN has provided webmaster with there own way of submitting XML or text based sitemaps for better indexing of websites and also provide them with webmaster tools for better performance over search engines. In this article I would tell about sitemap formats, how to submit sitemaps and webmaster tools provided by all three major search engines.

1. Google XML sitemaps and webmaster central tools: Google webmaster central allows you to submit XML sitemap and also provides you detailed information on how google view your site. You can check format for XML sitemaps at www.sitemaps.org or check Theseomarketing.com XML sitemap. After creating XML sitemap you need to login with your google account to http://www.google.com/webmasters and verify your site. Verification is basically to acknowledge that you are the actual owner of the site. Verification can be done in two ways either you can add given meta tag to your site or upload a verification file.

Once verification is done you have full access to webmaster central dashboard where you can have access to advanced features such as:

a) Settings: Using this tool you can provide google about information and preferences like geographic targeting, preferred domain (www or without www), image labeling option and google crawl rates etc.

b) Diagnostic: Here you can check crawling errors, content analysis (Problems related to Meta data) and mobile crawl errors.

c) Statistics: Statistics provides you with data such as top search queries, google crawl and index stats, google feed subscriber stats etc.

d) Links: Here you can control which pages of your website to include in google sitel

e) Tools: Tools provide you with ability to create enhanced 404 pages, analyze robots.txt, remove URLs, and manage site verification and various other gadgets you can use.

2. Yahoo Site Explorer tool: Yahoo site explorer allows you to add yahoo text sitemap. Yahoo text sitemap is basically in .txt format with all the pages of the website included. Once you have created and uploaded your yahoo text sitemap login at https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com with yahoo id and submit your sitemap. Verification method in yahoo is also the same as that of google. After verification yahoo site explorer provides you with following features:

a) My sites: Here you can control sites you have added and explore yahoo saturation and backlinks for the sites.

b) Summary: Here you can see summary of your website submission like submission status like verification, number of users, number of feeds etc.

c) Statistics: Here you can check total crawled pages, hosts and domains that are used in internal and external links to your domain.

d) Crawl errors: Crawl errors related to your domain (if any) are displayed here.

e) Actions: remove urls and manage dynamic urls

3. MSN: MSN don’t have any particular sitemap format yet, however you can submit you site map at http://webmaster.live.com/ . Here you can specify your website and location of your html sitemap. Another way of submitting sitemap to MSN is add sitemap to the robots.txt file for your website.

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Professional website developers know the importance of web design and the role it plays in making a website successful. Designing a successful website is no easy task, especially for someone who is new to the world of web development. With the help of web development applications many people can and do create decent websites. But decent in most cases is not good enough to make a site successful from a traffic or financial standpoint.

There are five crucial components of web design that you must focus on in order to make a site valuable to its visitors and successful for you.

- SEO – Getting free traffic to your site.
- Usability – Ease of navigating around the site and finding desired information quickly.
- Aesthetics – Visual appeal.
- Content – Valid, up to date, relevant information
- Graphics – Eye candy that relays relevant visual information to the visitor.

SEO
Before you ever lay down a byte of HTML code for a site you have to know and understand at least the basics of SEO and how it fits into the design. SEO is the art of designing a site in a fashion that gives the site an advantage for obtaining free and abundant traffic.

The number one aspect of SEO is selecting keywords relevant to your site. The keywords you select should be based on high usage, low competition and relevancy to your topic. Once you select keywords you can then begin the development of your site. Keep in mind keywords are a critical aspect of the design. The keywords you choose will be applied within the design in strategic fashion to benefit the flow of traffic to your site. To understand more on how to implement SEO you should read and learn more about this important subject. If you don’t, your website success will be difficult to achieve.

Usability
Your website must be easy to navigate and designed in a way that makes it easy to find information. Visitors will not stay long if it takes more than one or two clicks to get the information they want or if it takes brain power to figure out how to get the information they want. One of the goals of your site design is to keep usability easy, and simple. To do this, apply the following three fundamentals of usability.

* Provide a site search tool. A visitor in a hurry can quickly find the info they desire then move on to the action they desire.
* Provide simple, intuitive and consistent site navigation.  This provides visitors the tool they need to leisurely explore their way through your site.
* Provide logical and simple to follow content. The message of a site should start off in a simple and basic fashion with well defined links pointing the way to more detailed information or explanation as needed.

In the cases above the goal is to make it easy for your visitor to find the information they want without frustration or difficulty. Doing this well will have a positive effect on increasing the return of your visitors.

Aesthetics
A website has to look clean, uncomplicated and strike a balance in layout that is pleasant to the visitor. Pleasing aesthetics come about when the colors of a site complement each other, the graphics blend and lend continuation of the theme and the layout brings unity and openness to the page.

Often overlooked by novice designers is the color palette of the site. While you can select color in a willy-nilly fashion and still provide a visually appealing site, a better idea for color selection should be based on an understanding of the color wheel and proven color strategies.

Many web designers often view a web page as an opportunity to blast a visitor with lots of information in hopes this will convince the visitor to take action. Usually this results in a quick exit due to the overwhelming visual effect and complicated look. A better approach is to provide less content and open space (referred to as white space) to allow visitors eyes to scan and explore with ease.

Content
An important feature of any website is the quality of the text content. Visitors come to a site expecting to find answers to their questions, solutions to their problems or for entertainment value. The content offered at your site must be well-written, without grammatical or spelling errors. It also has to be relevant to the theme of your site, with valid, up to date information for your visitors. Content is King!

Graphics
You can have a functional and usable website without graphic elements. However, if there are similar sites to yours that employ graphics, guess which site will get the most traffic. The necessary companions to any well-designed site are the images and illustrations that grace its pages. The images can’t be any willy-nilly graphic that you might think is cool. Graphic imagery has to support your branding, and communicate the message you are trying to convey. Before you incorporate graphic elements into your site, take some time to look around the web. Notice what looks good and how elements are laid out. These same layouts techniques can be used as models for your site.

The Internet is a highly competitive business arena. To be successful with a commercial website, you have to keep these five crucial web design elements in mind. Contrary to what many will tell you, it is rarely possible to have commercial success without the benefit of a professional website. This is not to say that you must hire a professional, however you must implement professional design elements to improve your chances for success.

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How to make money? This is the question that most of us want answer to. In today’s world, no matter how much you make, it just doesn’t seem enough. But thankfully, the same world offers us so many new opportunities to make money.

Everybody today knows what websites are. But unfortunately not many know that its also very profitable. I suppose the main reason being that people who know how profitable they are just don’t want any competition. So they keep us away from this wonderful opportunity by spreading wrong facts about websites being expensive, really hard to build and maintain.

This article, hopefully, will prove them all wrong and show you exactly how to build a website, how to maintain it and how to profit from it. This article will cover the basic steps. Look for my other articles that I’ll be posting soon for more details.

So here are the 5 basic steps:

1) Select a topic
2) Register a domain
3) Buy web space
4) Build and maintain pages
5) Monetize

Let me elaborate.

1) Select a topic
To begin, you need to think up a topic on which you are going to build a website (this step is also called keyword research). It can be anything. But make sure its something you know about because you’ll have to write on this topic to build your pages. Once you have a topic (that you know or that you know you can write about or you think you can have someone write it for you) selected, its time to move onto the next step. Select keywords that have enough demand yet not so much competition. For your keyword research use the following free tool: Free Keyword Tool

2) Register a domain
Your website needs a domain so that people can access it. Domain, simply put, is the name people must type in the address bar of their browser to view your site. Now there are hundreds of domain sellers, so select anyone, it doesn’t really matter. But of course, charges are different so you want to go for a cheap one.

3) Buy web space
Now this is the most essential part. Your site needs space to store its pages and files. That’s why you need to buy some web space. Again, there are hundreds out there who offer web spaces (also called web hoster), but in this case, it does matter who you buy from. Firstly, make sure they offer you enough space. 500MB+ should be good enough. But most web hosting companies allows only 1 domain. This means that only one website can use this space. So make sure that you select a host that offers 5+ domain hosting since you’ll be able to host more site on the same space and reap more profits. Next, make sure they offer good amount of bandwidth. Bandwidth is the amount of data send and received. Select a host that offers a good amount of bandwidth since then your sites will load quicker and support larger traffic (users).

4) Build and maintain pages
Once your site is all setup, you need to build your site. Most web hosting companies offer you with free tools to help you with it. Its just a lot of clicking to select the template of your choice, placing images and in the end of course typing in the content for you site. Make the content unique and attractive to make people keep coming back to your site. Also make it a habit to update it regularly (once a week is good enough unless concerned with daily changes).

5) Monetize
Final step is to monetize your site. Sign up for affiliate programs and link up to those affiliate programs (make sure they are related to your site’s topic). Sign up for Google AdSense to have ads appear on your site. You get earn a small amount whenever a visitor to your site clicks on any of the ads. You can also link to other people’s site to increase traffic. You can also sell ad space in your pages to companies willing to pay for having their ads appear on your site.

Well there you have it. 5 steps all laid out well. So go on and follow these steps today!

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The popularity of web 2.0 is spreading like wild forest fire in the world of internet. Yet many people are not aware of the benefits of this concept. They take it as meaningless thing but in reality web 2.0 is an effective tool for web surfing, online marketing, networking and so on.

With advent of web 2.0, it has paved the way for newer concepts and browsing styles. The power of interaction has improved drastically which is essential for making powerful base for application development. There are different new applications like tagging, dragging, dropping, RSS, slide transitions and many more that were unknown to the users earlier but now they are getting explored and being used.

Web 2.0 can be stated as latest tool in web economy that is the result of newly formed activity between the website and the service providers. It can be also stated as social element that has been extracted from new types of social communities and networks. This technology builds up an online platform where global information is made available to people providing flexibility in organizing, sharing and creating the information in acceptable format.

Here you can advertise or publicize your products or services in novel ways which you have not even thought before. Now product promotion is not just limited to banner advertisements, it can be done through blogs and other interactive features. When a product is featured on a blog or podcast that has big visitors base, it is likely to get many bookmarks to the respective website, thus doing online advertising.

You can also except more amount of web traffic to your website, but if it is not directed in a correct manner than it can get wasted. Having a properly designed web page with relevant information helps.

The websites that have been designed using web 2.0 is considered as a strong sales magnet due to active customer participation and better connectivity with other websites. They are much stronger than traditionally designed type websites, where sales was not higher as targeted.

Web 2.0 helps in establishing stronger relationship with the clients. You can even distribute many varieties of products altogether. Even you can advertise and publicize your products and services to all your imaginable markets. Products/services can also be distributed in many ways, where not only selling but also sharing, testing and personalizing can be done. You can attract large number of prospective customers thus giving way for higher sales.

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The global economic scenario goes haywire now-a-days. People frantically talk about economic recession with a ‘what-will-be-my-future’ sort of look in their anxiety-filled eyes.

Even Nasscom, the industry association, points out that the current fiscal crisis in the United States will adversely affect the Indian BPO/IT sectors as the clients from USA would be very vigilant in their unrestricted spending on outsourcing their projects.

But, imbibing the spirit of true ‘Indianism’, we are good at the art making positives out of negatives. So we are as quick as a squirrel to turn this crisis into an advantage for the BPO sector in the long run.

The advantages of Indian BPO industry in the present scenario is discussed in the article.

This global economic recession will force diverse financial organizations to outsource more work to cut costs to a large extent. This will definitely boost the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) from the financial services sectors abroad, with our estimated work inflow increased to 40-45 times the current market size over the next five years.

Today the Indian BPO is the most upcoming and mushrooming industry attracting the educated youth all over the country. Indian BPO workforce offers several advantages over their western counterparts both in terms of cost savings (low-cost labour) and availability of resourceful manpower.

The revenue generated by the BPO & KPO industry in India is estimated to Rs.1,160 crores and provides employment to almost 7-8 lakh people in the year 2007-08. The largest contributor to the Indian BPO-KPO export market in 2007 is USA with a lion’s share of around 61%.

The Everest Research Institute predicts that for India, being the hub of global outsourcing for financial services, the opportunity for global BPO will mount to USD145 to 165 billion for India based services, within the next five years. The outsourcing of BPO projects from the insurance sector will have a steady rise, about 12-15 times simultaneously, according to the report.

Banking sectors and other financial firms are undergoing significant cost-reduction pressure and are therefore planning to move jobs offshore.

As I told you earlier in this article, Indians have the untiring spirit to rise from the ashes like the phoenix. Let this spirit kindle the minds of our people to rise up from the unrest and anxiety that looms around and to strive more to reap the best out of the worst.

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