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Sitemaps: Know ‘Em, Use ‘Em, Love ‘Em

It’s easy to forget about sitemaps, especially these days as XML sitemaps become standard, since they often do their work behind the scenes, often not even visible to any normal user on your site. Depending on what tool you use to create them, it’s easy for even you to forget about them, as they’re often created and updated automatically.

Sitemaps are essentially a table of contents of your site, listing every single page on your site. Back in ancient times, sitemaps were displayed just like any other .html or .php page, and were often shown hierarchically, looking a bit like a family tree, with each page accounted for and hyperlinked to the corresponding page where it was at.

Sitemaps served double duty, acting as a potential navigation tool for users on your site (I’ll sometimes still use sitemaps for that purpose today, if I’m not finding a specific page that I believe might exist, especially when hunting for affiliate programs on merchant sites, as they don’t often make those links prominent to the general public) as well as an aid to search engine spiders that are indexiing your site.

Over time, sitemaps trended towards the latter, as webmasters realized the value of sitemaps in an SEO sense, since they provide an extra layer of protection to ensure that spiders find all of your pages and that no orphan pages get left out. Search engines themselves saw the value in sitemaps as well, since it made their jobs easier, so Google has always been a strong proponent of using sitemaps on your site.

As sitemaps shifted towards more of a back-end tool, their format began to change, too, with Google pushing webmasters to use an XML format that Google developed in 2005. Yahoo and MSN agreed to support the XML-Sitemaps format in late 2006, so all three of the major search engines are on board, and send their spiders to periodically search the same pool of sitemaps submitted to them.

What does all this mean to you, as an affiliate? You need to get on the sitemap trolley if you aren’t, and create a sitemap in the standard XML format and submit it to Google.

Depending on your setup, this can be pretty simple. Since I’m always singing the praises of WordPress, let’s start there, as, no surprise, there are existing tools that make it a piece of cake to create and submit XML sitemaps iff you’re using WordPress.

First you need to grab a handy Sitemap Generator for WordPress free plugin. Installation is a snap, just upload the sitemap.php file to your Plugins folder and follow the instructions. Activate the plugin, have it generate the first sitemap for you, and you’re done, as it automatically pings Google and lets it know that your sitemap is ready to be spidered. If you don’t trust the wonder of automations, you can also submit the URL for the XML sitemap to Google at this page.

If you submit it manually, you now have to jump through a few hoops, as Google is now making you wade through some extra steps. The first time you hit that page, it’ll ask you to log-in to take advantage of it’s publisher tools, yada yada yada. I’d recommend doing so, even if you don’t have an existing Google account, as there are some useful tools there, which I’ll touch on later. So do all that, log in, and then click on the link above again. That’ll take you (finally) to the specific page to manually submit your XML sitemap.

One very cool thing about the plugin above is that you can set it on auto-pilot, so that it automaatically rebuilds your sitemap to include new pages you’ve created and pings Google, letting it know that your sitemap is ready to be crawled. (And no, I’m not being Google-centric, as Google shares its database of XML sitemaps with Yahoo and MSN, so submitting your sitemap to Google is just like submitting it to all three places.) Another cool feature of the plugin is that you can prioritize certain types of content in your sitemap, rank the types of things that are most important to you to get spidered, etc.

If you’re not using WordPress, don’t despair, as it’s pretty simply to create an XML sitemap by hand, upload it to your server, and submit it to Google. XML-Sitemaps.com offers a free generator (which works for sites with up to 500 pages), where you simply input your URL and follow the instructions. After you’ve created your XML sitemap and uploaded it to your server, use the link above to manually submit it to Google Sitemaps for crawling.

And that’s pretty much it. One thing to remember is that you shouldn’t rely on sitemaps to save you from sloppy site design, and should always use good link structure with multiple ways for users and spiders to find the content on your site. Sitemaps should simply be seen as an insurance policy to make sure that all of your good, juicy content gets indexed, not a solution in and of themselves.

Optimizing Your Permalinks Structure in WordPress

This one is just for the WordPress crowd, and takes all of two seconds to implement, but one thing to be aware of with WordPress is that a few of its out-of-the-box features need tweaking, if you’re using it for affiliate purposes (or if you’re simply looking to get as much search engine traffic as possible).

The most important one, which I’ve simply gotten into the habit of changing every single time I launch a new site using WordPress, is the permalinks setting. Permalinks are basically the permanent URLS for your pages that WordPress automatically generates, whenever you create a new post or page. The default setting for these look like this:

http://www.bluewidgets.com/?p=192

That works fine as a URL link, as far as functionality goes, but it doesn’t help us from a SEO perspective. If you can, you should always try to incorporate the keywords you’d like to rank well for in search results into the actual URL. If you’re writing good content and picking good titles, the easiest way to do that is to simply use the title of the content in your URL. So if I were writing a page about “Blue widgets”, and it was titled “Blue widgets”, I’d prefer that the URL for that page look something like this:

http://www.bluewidgets.com/bluewidgets

instead of

http://www.bluewidgets.com/?p=192

Happily, there’s an incredibly simply solution, if you’re using WordPress. Just login and click on “Options” in the dashboard. In the sub-tabs you’ll see tabs for “General”, “Writing”, “Discussion”, etc. Click on the “Permalinks” tab there.

Once you’re on the Permalink tabs, you’ll see some choices there, with radio buttons. “Default” should already be selected. Click on the option below it, which is “Date and name based”. Hit the “Update Permalink Structure” button in the bottom right and voila, you’re done. All of those links that were previously not helping you in the eyes of search engines (the http://www.bluewidgets.com/?p=192 ones) have magically been converted into links with your juicy titles incorporated into the URL (now looking like http://www.bluewidgets.com/bluewidgets).

There’s pretty much no reason to ever use the ugly default permalinks settings, so this is one of those things that I have trained myself to always change, right after getting WordPress set up on a new site.

“But I’m Creating an Affiliate Site, Right, Not a Blog?”

One thing I forget to address when recommending WordPress as a content management system for creating and managing your affiliate sites was the idea that it’s solely a blogging tool, and that anything created with WordPress is therefore a blog, and not a proper website.

At the heart of this, I think, is the fact that most WordPress themes, out of the box, are set up for use as a blog, with comments enabled, with an “About” section for info on the author/blogger. They look like a blog when you turn them on. Which makes much sense, as that’s what WordPress was originally designed for.

It’s also a bit confusing as many affiliate sites are, in fact, blogs, as affiliates have had a lot of success with that model, since users connect personally with blog authors and it’s generally easier to encourage them to click through links, especially if they’re directly related to the content and theme of the blog.

When I recommend using WordPress to manage your affiliate sites, I’m not encouraging you to use the blog format for all of your affiliate sites. That’s a format that has proven successful, and it’s a good place to start, but it’s very easy to use WordPress to create affiliate sites that aren’t blogs at all, too.

Confused yet? It’s actually really simple, if you look at some examples.

This site itself is a bit of a hybrid. I have comments turned on and I encourage interaction from users (both key elements in blogs), but most of the posts are instructional content. If I created a traditional site that didn’t use WordPress it would actually be structured exactly the same, as I’d have the same categories that  would contain links to the same existing articles I’m creating. I use WordPress because it makes my life much easier, as I don’t have to update a page of links, make sure all the changes happen throughout the site, etc.

If I wanted, though, I could easily turn off the comments and remove any hint of them, like I did at the Cisco certifications site I’m (still) working on. I plan on taking that a step further there and removing both the Calendar and Archives in the sidebar to the left and tweaking the theme so that it doesn’t publish the date of each post in the top right of each page. That is all very easy to do, as far as editing a few lines in the PHP code of the themes, and the end result is that many of the elements that make it seem like a blog (comments, dates on posts, and an archive or calendar that shows posts by month) are suddenly gone.

To an average surfer landing on that site, they would have no vlue that it had started its life as a “blog”, and it’d look like any other website. I’d still be able to use WordPress as a convenient, Web-based tool to publish and manage my website, without being forced into the box of all my sites being “blogs”.

You can also mix and match elements, such as a new site I’m working on, Patio to Pool. I’m keeping lots of the normal blog elements, but I turned off comments. The goal with that site is to build pages for all sorts of juicy patio and pool search terms that pay well in Adsense, but to keep the user interaction limited. I want them to be able to associate the site with a face and a voice (Pool and Patio Gal), but I don’t want to expend time answering comments, deleting comment spam, responding to emails, etc.  I’m trying to have my cake and eat it too, as far as presenting a friendly, casual format (a blog about patio and pool stuff) that people can connect to, but without the element that creates a ton of work for me, the comments.

Those are just a few examples of how you can modify the output of Wordpress to work for you in different ways, depending on what form you want your affiliate site to take. The key message to take away is that WordPress is actually pretty flexible, so no, you’re not locked into creating a blog when you use it for affiliate purposes, as you can actually tweak and modify it in all sorts of ways to suit your purposes.