What is a Google Sitemap?

Google Sitemaps help Google’s search engine spider discover and index pages on your website. In its basic form, a Google Sitemap is a list of all the webpages on your website. When Google’s search engine spider reads this list, it then knows about all those webpages that are specified in the sitemap. Google Sitemaps come in two formats: xml sitemaps and text sitemaps. Both formats contain the addresses of all the webpages on your website. The XML version contains additional information about each webpage such as its last modification date and roughly how often it is updated.

How Does a Google Sitemap Help Me?

If your website does not have a Google Sitemap, Google’s search engine spider downloads a webpage from your website and scans through it looking for any links that it contains to other webpages in your website. Google’s spider then downloads all those newly discovered pages and repeats the process of scanning for links. Such download and scanning takes time. If you have a Google Sitemap, Google’s spider immediately knows about all the webpages on your website. Reading the Google Sitemap is considerably faster than having to download and scan each page. A Google Sitemap also helps if your webpages are not well linked together or not at all. In that case, without a Google Sitemap, it may take a while for some webpages to be discovered or discovered at all. Google Sitemaps eliminate that problem.

Does Google.com Index Everything?

The answer to that question is no. Google.com states, “we can’t guarantee that URLs from your Sitemap will be added to the Google index.” Even though Google.com does not guarantee that it will index everything that you specify in your Google Sitemap, a Google Sitemap should increase the opportunity that your webpages will be indexed sooner since Google will know about them sooner. If Google does not know about your webpages, they definitely will not be indexed.

If I Create a Sitemap Will It Hurt Me?

Google.com states, “In most cases, webmasters will benefit from Sitemap submission, and in no case will you be penalized for it.” Google.com uses the information contained in your Google Sitemap to learn about the structure of your website and to better schedule its search engine spider in the scanning (a.k.a. crawling or spidering) of your website.

How Do I Generate a Google Sitemap?

There are several tools available that you use to create Google Sitemap. Google.com itself even provides a sitemap generator written in the Python programming language. There are also websites where you type in your website address and its spider goes and scans your website to determine all your webpages; however, such scanning is time consuming since every page on your website must be scanned, and the process must be initiated by you. A faster way of generating a Google Sitemap is to use Google Sitemap generator software that runs locally on your website.

How Can I Automate Google Sitemap Generation?

Creating sitemaps can be an automated process. The simplest way is to install and use the sitemap.pl Google Sitemap generator software. Once you install this software in your cgi-bin directory, the software will automatically generate the Google Sitemap each time it is accessed. This software is of the type whereby you can “set it and forget it”. You can go about adding to your website and you do not have to worry about updating your Google Sitemap. The software works by scanning your website’s hard drive looking for files to include in your Google Sitemap. By directly accessing the hard drive rather than downloading webpages, the software very quickly generates the Google Sitemap. On a typical server, the sitemap.pl sitemap generator software finds about 500 webpages per second (that’s 2 ms/page).

How Do I Tell Google.com About My Google Sitemap?

There are two ways that you can use to tell Google.com about your Google Sitemap. The first method is the simplest and the quickest to do. In your robots.txt file, include a line that says “sitemap:” followed by the website address of your Google Sitemap. For example, the Google Sitemap of the bime.com website is located at http://www.bime.com/sitemap.xml thus its robots.txt file contains a line that states, sitemap: http://www.bime.com/sitemap.xml The second method involves logging into Google.com Webmaster Tools at http://www.google.com/sitemaps and adding your site to the Sites Dashboard, and then submitting your Google Sitemap. Once you add your site, click the “Verify” link and follow the instructions and you will gain access to additional statistics about your website and status information about the processing of your Google Sitemap.

In Summary, What Do I Need to Do?

1. Use a Google Sitemap Generator such as sitemap.pl

2. Add your Google Sitemap to your robots.txt file.

3. Add your site to Google Webmaster Tools

4. Submit your Google Sitemap.

Having an Google Sitemap is a good first step to get your webpages indexed. And with an automated sitemaps generator, improve the possibility of your webpages being indexed and showing up in search engine results.

If you would like to get into the webmaster industry, you should know that Photoshop is the perfect tool for making your very own website.

Photoshop will allow even the beginning webmaster the ability to create an entire web template from scratch. After you’re done, you can easily use

Image Ready to cut up the template image and spit out the HTML code for you – simple and easy. If you have something more specific within your

webpage you want to alter, like the navigation or certain images for example, Photoshop can helpyou with this as well. It doesn’t matter what you are utilizing Photoshop for, it willdefinitelybenefit the overall image and smoothness of your website.

In the old days webmasters had to resort to coding their webpages by hand. This was a long and tedious process which was very drawn out -

testing and altering the code could take hours. With Photoshop on your side you don’t have to worry about spending vast amounts of timecreating your website. You can create the overall look of your site and then transfer it to Image Ready, which will then slice the image into smaller HTML elements. After this, all you will have to do is insert your webpage content into the white space that you left for yourself in the template. After you have placed the content on your site, it will be ready to

go.

You should be concerned with load times when you are working with images. With Photoshop you can optimize all the images you work with so that you can make sure your visitors are getting the fastest load times

possible.

You will also be delighted to know that Photoshop can help brighten up your navigation bar. Using Image Ready, you can create superblookingrollover effects that will make your visitors want to click to other pages within your site. Instead of having to fiddle with Javascript to get this done, Image Ready will make sure it’s already done for you, giving you more time to work on other things on your site.

As you can see Photoshop is one of the best weapons a webmaster has – so take full advantage of it!

Caffeinated Content for WordPress

Background check has become too accessible today that one can simply check on another’s pasts by just drooling on Google or any internet search engine. All the more that background checking’s prominence is pushed to surface into the limelight many people have constantly opposing its accessibility though few uphold democracy on background check issues. However, background checks done over search engines are predominantly not to be trusted all the more that there are no factors or instruments to verify any result that search engine can give. Well for the part of the person being checked, Google or Yahoo in any case can only give the primary information of the said person which will not exceed to names and addresses.

The main problem here is not the accessibility if the process but the irresponsible usage of such process. The only thing that bothers people or anyone being checked is the publication of their names and other personal information that might lead to problems such as identity theft and other similar crimes. One concrete example of the irresponsible usage of background checking is the one done on Joe the Plumber. Joe the Plumber was a character that was animated during the height of the presidential campaigns this year. His real name is Joe Wurzelbacher. Joe was an average man and a plumber in profession. He was the one who questioned the then Senator Barrack Obama about certain economic policies. The noise that Joe has done has become a ray of hope for the Republicans to spill out the Democrats’ weaknesses. Joe later appeared in many of Sen. John McCain’s campaign appearances and has his own brand in the website of the GOP Presidential candidate.

On November 20, 2008, a report from The Star online version exposed a move to discredit Joe by means of conducting background check on him. According to the news report, the one who conducted a background check and personally search government records and archives is a director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. The findings of the investigative body headed by Insp. General Tom Charles, the culling out of Joe’s records from government archives is illegitimate and that it was conducted with no clear purpose whatsoever. The issue has become more intense when it is the department that conducted the search and that it was done amidst the national presidential campaign.

Said investigation fortunately explained that the search conducted and the information about Joe was not released to support or to mock any political activity. The only seen angle here is that there was no clear intention on the part of the Ohio Department on why it had made such check.

The head of the department was Helen Jones-Kelley. She was put into suspension for a month over diverse allegations including the use of government emails and other state own properties to advance her personal interests.

There were 18 background checks that were done to Joe and 8 of the reports are found to have no legal basis or purpose. The remaining 10 searches are done for job purposes and employment. According to Jones-Kelly in a letter to Senate President Bill Harris, her department did the checking on the hope to be sure that Joe has the capacity to buy a business despite the reported evaded taxes. But Charles disproves this explanation by saying that all Jones-Kelley’s statements were ambiguous, contradictory, and inconsistent.

Tyler, Brown and Reinhart to Incumbent GOP:  Stop Hiding Behind Spin Machine and Let’s Debate the Issues

“Straight A’s for Change” Democratic Team Challenges Incumbent Republicans to Six Debates Beginning in July

(MT. LAUREL, NJ) — The “Straight A’s for Change” Democratic team of Tim Tyler for County Clerk and Chris Brown and Mary Anne Reinhart for Freeholder today issued a challenge to the incumbent Republicans for six debates prior to the November 4th General Election.

The proposal would include one debate in July, one in August, one in September and three in October in order to give the residents and taxpayers of Burlington County multiple opportunities to listen to the positions of the candidates on the issues that matter most to their families.

Potential sponsors and venues could include some traditional, (Medford Leas; Mapleton; League of Women Voters; Burlington County Times) as well as some new, hosts such as Burlington County College, the Courier Post or Philadelphia Inquirer among others.

“The Republican candidates can contact Heather Israel at (609) 707-1801 and we will expeditiously begin working out the details for the debates,” said Tim Tyler, candidate for County Clerk.  “We feel that six debates over the next four months are more than reasonable and will allow residents the opportunity to see where we all stand on the issues.  Of course, if the incumbent Republicans would like more debates we would be receptive to that discussion as well.”

“If the incumbent Republicans think they can simply spend another half million dollars on glossy attack mail, or ask their top insiders and patrons to take out a half million dollars in loans to televise their desperate campaign of lies and distortions they are badly mistaken.  Burlington County taxpayers are tired of the same old negative campaigns and deserve real answers to the issues that matter most,” said Chris Brown, candidate for Freeholder.

“Tim, Chris and I look forward to an open, honest discussion of the issues that matter most to Burlington County’s families,” said Reinhart.

“I don’t believe those paying over $4.00 a gallon for gas, moms driving their kids to soccer practice, men and women commuting to work, and those seniors who have been deprived of public transportation by the Freeholders, really cares about whether Aubrey Fenton and Stacy Jordan won some low turnout, Republican primary. We look forward to hearing from our opponents as soon as possible so that we can schedule July’s debate,” said Reinhart, candidate for Freeholder.