Not every site needs a site map, they can certainly be a good idea. Site maps provide a dual purpose: They provide search engine spiders easy access to all of your site pages and they provide site visitors easy access to all of your site pages. The difference is that search engines and visitors access your site map differently and therefore there are different methods that need to be applied to creating site map(s) that are friendly for both engines and search spiders.

Small sites typically don't need a site map so long as all pages are linked in the main navigation. Once you get into main and sub-navigation menu's then site maps are helpful in allowing search engines and visitors to quickly find anything they are looking for within just a couple of clicks. A single site map can be used for both purposes or multiple site maps can be created. Here we'll address creating site maps for spiders and humans separately.

Site Map For Spiders

.xml file

An .xml document should be added to your site's root directory containing links to all site pages. This .xml file should then be referenced should be compiled and placed into a proper .xml document which should be uploaded into the root directory.

Robots.txt file

With your .xml site map file in place you must then make it accessible to search spiders. Reference the site map in your robots.txt file by adding a line for sitemap: URL (example: sitemap: http://www.polepositionmarketing.com/sitemap.xml)

Keep current

Be sure that your .xml file is updated and uploaded frequently, or at least as often as pages are added or removed from your site. Large sites should implement an automated site map update monthly or even weekly or daily.

Site Map For Visitors

Navigation links

A site map designed for human visitors is just like any other website page. Link to the site map page should be included in the primary navigation or the site's global footer. Visitors should be able to find this link without too much searching.

Additional page links

Site map should also be linked from various pages within the site such as Help pages and your custom 404-redirect page. This helps point visitors to the site map as a quick and easy means to find what they need.

Overview

It's helpful to provide a short overview paragraph at the top of your site map page. This can be a nice introduction should someone land on this page directly from a search engine or elsewhere.

Heading and layout

The layout of the site map should present a clear visual hierarchal structure or your website. Both headings and sub-headings should be used above properly grouped links.

Text links & descriptions

Site map should primarily use textual links and page should not be cluttered with images or other distractions. It is also a good idea to provide an additional short description (provided there is room) for each link that allows the visitor to better understand where each link will take them.

Keep current

Be sure that your site map is updated and uploaded frequently, or at least as often as pages are added or removed from your site.

As I said above, not every site needs a site map. But those that do should be sure that the site map(s) they create are actually benefiting them. And the best way to do that is to make sure your site maps provide maximum usability for visitors and search engine spiders.

Keyword Research Tool

This is the most important tool if you want to make your website visible in the Search Engine (SE) like Google. The fact that 91% of Internet surfer are using SE to find information they want made the Search Engine Ranking Position (SERP) as the most effective way to attract targeted visitors.

Besides that, the advanced keyword research tools can also indicate the keywords' profitability as well. As a result, you can focus on developing web pages surrounding those keywords for maximum profits. And these tools cost either $97 to $176 once-off payment or $167 to $599 yearly subscription.

Domain Name

You can get the cheapest domain names at 1and1 which cost $6.99 per year. However, it is limited to certain countries only. If your country is not listed in 1and1, you can still purchase cheap domain name at GoDaddy for only $9.99 per year.

But be very careful not to search your domain availability in Network Solutions. Otherwise, your preferred domain will be locked for few days which leave you with no options but to pay $34.99 per year for that domain name.

Web Hosting

For unlimited web space and bandwidth, you have to pay $119 per year. To have huge web space and bandwidth is important because you will need both to grow your online businesses. A part from that, you must choose hosting that offer the highest server uptime too so that your website is reliable.

Website Building Software

Website Builder can cost you anywhere from $97 to $766. It really depends on your needs e.g. build for Adsense income, affiliate marketing or eBay store. It is advisable that you choose one that fit your existing needs as well as other features for future business expansion. I prefer to use Site Build It since it require not HTML knowledge and fit to all monetization plans.

SE Submission Services

As mentioned before, SE plays a big role in the cyber world. To ensure that your website remain valid in the eye of SE giants like Google and Yahoo, you need to update them whenever you build new web pages. And SE submission service costs about $189 per year.

Other than submitting your website to the SEs, they will also advice you on ways to optimize your web pages for maximum SE Optimization (SEO) benefits.

SE Monitoring Tool

This tool will help you to gauge how your web pages are performing in the eye of SE. The way this tool works is that, it crawls pages that ranked top in SERP and supply you the SEO details on how it was ranked that high. This can cost you about $167.

Auto-responder

In today's situation, auto-responder is not an option anymore. If you are serious about making money online, this is the first thing you should consider to own after the website builder and keyword research tool. Despite the fact that you have to pay $179 per year for this service, the benefits will outweigh the cost incurred if you do it right.

These tools can easily cost you $661 per year on top of the $264 once-off payment. Of course it is a very expensive, but if you compare with the cost of building a successful business in the real world (offline); which takes $50,000 the least, it is so much affordable for most Infopreneurs.

But the good news is that, Site Build It is offering all the tools mentioned above for only $299 per year.

Reusing pieces of HTML code is a common way of making web sites (or web applications) more consistent, reliable, and more manageable. Even a small web site consisting of perhaps 20 or 30 web pages can benefit from reusing code for header and footer sections, for example. If the same header or footer is used across all the pages on the site, it makes sense to put the header and footer code in separate files, and then call those files to insert their contents where required.

PHP offers two statements that can be used for inserted the contents of one file inside another: include() and require(). These two statements are virtually identical, with the only real difference being that if require() fails, it gives a fatal error, whereas if include() fails it just gives a warning. For this reason I tend to use the include() statement as it just seems slightly more friendly.

So, to include the contents of a file called header.inc inside a web page called index.php, you would just need to insert the following line of code (wrapped in PHP opening and closing tags) inside index.php.

Include 'header.inc';

As PHP takes no notice of the extension used for the included file, you can use whatever extension you want to. Be careful though, if you put passwords inside an include file with a .inc extension, they will be visible. You can get around this by putting include files that contain sensitive information outside the document tree to prevent people from browsing to them.

In Part 2 we'll look at the use of functions when developing web sites and applications.