---

Website Mapping

Let the Search Bots Know Your Site

The Sitemaps protocol is a method to inform search engines about all of the pages in your website that are available for crawling. A Sitemap is an Extensible Markup Language (XML) file that lists each page of your website. The site map can also include additional information about each page such as when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other pages in your site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently.

Sitemaps are particularly beneficial on websites when a site's main menu does not link to all pages of a website and to help index pages that use programming code such as asp.NET, Ajax or Flash as this content is not normally processed by search engines.

Having a site map is highly recommended especially in combination with the Site Submission service because Google, MSN, Yahoo, and Ask use the same protocol.

Sitemaps supplement and do not replace the existing crawl-based mechanisms that search engines already use to discover web pages. Submitting a site map to a search engine is a method to help that engine's crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site. While using this protocol does not guarantee that web pages will be included in search indexes, nor does it influence the way that pages are ranked in search results, it is a valuable tool to assist search engines crawl every page of your site.

Remember, on the internet, size matters, and you want the search engines to count every one of your pages.

Search Engine Management

Hands-on Management of Search Engine Tools

According to the Nielsen NetRatings Search Engine Ratings, the top search engines used today are:

1. Google - 50%

2. Yahoo - 24%

3. MSN - 10%

4. AOL - 6%

5. Ask - 2%

6. All others - 8%

All of the major search engines provide tools to help promote your site on their search engine. For example, Google has a suite of tools that can be used to list your site, add a link to your sitemap.xml page and report your site's key words and ranking.

All major search engines also offer ways to market on their site including fee based services, banner advertising, and premium listings. Each search engine is unique and so are the tools and services they offer.

Vision Quest can create a custom plan tailored to your website marketing goals to take advantage of these search engine tools.

---

---

The Importance of Website Statistics

Website statistics are perhaps the most under-utilized resource that a website owner has. Many owners do not understand what they are or that they have access to them, let alone read, understand and use them properly. Here's a crash course, hopefully highlighting the benefits of using your website stats effectively, with a quick description of what the main informational components of your website stats are.

So what are website statistics?

Once Vision Quest has installed and activated statistics services for your website, then all of the traffic to your website is recorded and saved to log files. You will have the ability to go to a secured Admin Center and login to view your website statistics as tabular and/or graphical data which is broken down into monthly and daily averages that you can view at any time.

So how are website statistics useful to you?

Simply put they can help you determine how your website is performing at any point or over a period of time (trend data). And let’s face it, who doesn't want to know how any of their business tools are performing? Your web stats can help you to answer questions such as this:

• Who is looking at my website?

• What pages are visitors most interested in?

• Where are they coming from?

• How do they get into my website and how do they leave?

• What search terms did they use on search engines to find my website?

The answers to these basic questions can tell you a lot about how your website is performing. If the enquiries from your website are low, then it can tell you whether that is because the traffic to your website is low, or because the traffic you are getting is not converting to enquiries. Or if you do an advertising campaign in a newspaper or some other medium, then your stats will tell you the number of increased visitors to the website at that time, thus providing a measure of success of that advertising campaign.

Reviewing your website statistics can help you to monitor the performance of your website at that time, see how trends have developed over time, and help you plan for your website’s future growth and development.

---

Search Engine Site Submission

The world of website optimization and promotion has changed, and your business needs more than just a submission program. It needs a complete promotion, positioning and optimization program that has changed with the times. Vision Quest provides you with the tools necessary to help you get better visibility and more search engine traffic on your website.

It used to be that to get your site noticed, you could simply get a submission program or service and before you knew it, you would see the traffic flowing in. Later, programs that promised to trick engines into giving you high ranking did the trick. Those are the old days. Today, submitting alone usually won't get you far, and any attempt to inappropriately boost your position will often result in disaster for your site.

To get traffic, you need to optimize and promote your website with a comprehensive plan which includes submitting to search engines on a regular basis, building a good website with relative content that is updated frequently, and building your site's popularity. These three things and some patience will deliver the best results for search engine listings and indexing.

How Vision Quest’s Search Engine Site Submission Service Works

1. Before we submit your website to major search engines such as Google and Excite!, we send you a form to provide a profile of your website including the key words relevant to your website.

2. We will review your profile and ensure it is appropriate so as not to inadvertently have content that would cause your site to be penalized by a search engine spider, and ensure that you have listed the most appropriate for your web pages.

3. We will then create your profile for submission using state of the art systems and submit that profile to the major search engines.

While it is possible to submit your website to thousands of Search Engines, Directories, and Link Sites... including the top U.S. and International search engines, such as Yahoo, Lycos, Open Directory and more, we recommend limiting submissions to the major search engines our your site will receive traffic that is not appropriate and you will be inundated with spam.

While there are no guarantees that submitting your website to the search engines will increase you placement on their indexes, it will ensure that your site is visited by the search engine search bots on a regular basis.