Sitemaps

Search engine optimization is a never ending journey.

This week, one of our siloed business units provided XML and TXT versions of sitemaps to provide at the root directory of our site. Our web team was left scratching our head at this decision and I was asked to research best practices in creating and posting sitemaps.

In a short period of time, I learned that our HTML sitemap was an unrecognizable format according to Google. How could it not render an HTML sitemap? The answer is simple: Google prefers XML sitemaps, which essentially look like the same kind of XML you would see with an XML RSS feed.

Inversely, I learned that Yahoo! prefers TXT sitemaps posted at your root directory.

Now we're in a bit of a quandary. I am in the process of figuring out the best way to design and maintain our XML and TXT sitemaps. Furthermore, I am trying to figure out how I can integrate this business unit's sitemap with ours without duplicating efforts. And I am wondering how often I will need to create these sitemaps on an ongoing basis. So far, I've found some helpful links which I will include below.

Sitemap Generators:
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=137793&package_id=153422
http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html

Sitemap Best Practices:
http://www.sitemaps.org/
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/about.html

I'm interested to fast forward to see what the outcome is of our situation. More to come!

New Internet Marketing Blog

I've spent the last 10 years practicing various forms of Internet marketing in my profession. I cut my teeth at a large advertising agency in Minneapolis, working in media buying spot radio and television and dabbling in interactive marketing. Then it was off to a privately held corporation in a marketing communications role which transitioned into a full-time online marketing position. Believe it or not, my title was Interactive Media Development Specialist. It barely fit on my business card. A few years later, I found myself as an Internet Marketing Supervisor at a major appliance manufacturer primarily working in the business to consumer (B2C) arena. This post finds me in the financial services and insurance field as a web consultant, working on various internet marketing projects including e-mail marketing,search engine marketing, search engine optimization, online advertising, and more.

I decided to launch this blog to dialogue on trends in Internet marketing and to see how far this medium has come in such a short time.

Stay tuned to read more about my journey into interactive marketing.