A sitemap is often considered redundant in the process of building a website, and that is indeed the fact if you made a sitemap for the sake of having one. By highlighting the importance of having a well constructed sitemap, you will be able to tailor your own sitemap to suit your own needs.

1) Site optimization purposes

We all want top rankings on Google, MSN, etc. It’s pretty hard to do when you’re an internet marketing newbie. There are a lot of internet marketers that have been around for awhile that are already there. This is of major importance to breaking through. When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every single page on your site. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page — they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website. On a blog this is usually done by your recent posts or archives. A great tool for this is in Google Analytics and it’s free to use. Just sign up for a free account.

2) Navigation purposes

You need it to be easy for your visitors to get where they want to be, or they’ll leave. A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site. If your visitors browse your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.

3) Conveying your site’s theme

When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to get the “big picture” of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors time.

4) Organization and relevance

A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird’s eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organized site with everything sorted according to their relevance.

From the above reasons, it is most important to implement a sitemap for website projects with a considerable size. Through this way, you will be able to keep your website easily accesible and neatly organized for everyone.

Getting Started

The first place to start like anything you do is with a plan. No matter what you’re planning on doing or selling on the internet, just like in brick and mortar life, you need a plan. This place looks really cool and appears to have everything you need for free. Startup Business School I myself have not used this site, but plan on going back and checking it out in more depth after I get done here. A great blog about planning and strategies is here written by the guy that started Palo Alto Software. Just be careful where you get your information. One site I went to offered free business plan templates, but you had to go thru all this sales BS, apply for 3 offers, etc. etc. You don’t want to go there. Another thing to expect is what ever you do online, any time you take an offer, you will have to supply your email address so they can add you to their "list". It doesn’t take much before your email is overflowing with "special offers". Most the time you can unsubscribe pretty easily.

You also need to think about what your goals are as you are writing your plan. You know the old saying "if you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?"

Website, Blog or Neither?

You’ll probably see a lot of headlines about how you can make tons of money on the internet "an you don’t even need a website". Pretty basically it’s true that you don’t have to have a website. What you can do is "partner" with people, selling their stuff and using their webpages. These people are called "affiliates". They pay you a commission for selling their stuff. You need to

1. Keep track of what they owe you
2. You still need a way to capture everyone’s name and email address to build your own "list".
3. The tools for selling their stuff is usually the same thing a million other people are using to do the same thing.

The bottom line is you still really need to have a "home". So after the planning comes how you are going to take your place on the internet.

The Website

I had products that I sold offline that I wanted to move online, so I started with a website. (You can see it at Beamish’s Brass Tacks ). The thing about a website is it’s more work to update for fresh content, but it does give you a pretty permanent web presence. It’s also yours so no one can tell you what to put on it or how to run it.

The greatest place I’ve found for learning HTML code is The Hidden Vault. It’s very basic but has both video and writing and provides a great way to see exactly how code works. Every time you make a change you can see it. It’s really terrific for the most basic beginning.

After you get used to playing with that, then you can go on to more in-depth tutoring. One place to go is Build Website 4 You and another terrific site for learning to build your own website is the Website Wizard. His first step is to buy your domain name, etc. which I don’t agree with, but it is a pretty comprehensive step-by-step. I like to have a plan, the website ready to go so all I have to do is load it on whatever server I choose, and then get my webhost and domain name.

The Blog

The fastest, easiest and cheapest way to get up and running is by using a "blog" for your website. The platforms are free and you can change content every day if you wish. The one thing about a blog is that you do need to add fresh content often, so pick something you know a lot about, feel passionate about, and feel like you could write about forever. Just in case you are really a newbie, a blog is a web journal. It’s like a journal you would write in often, only online for the world to see.

The two most popular platforms are Blogger and Wordpress. I personally have never understood it, but for some reason Google likes Wordpress when it comes to rankings, even tho Blogger is a Google product. One thing I should warn you about Blogger, especially if you’re planning on selling anything is they do have a tendancy evidently to lock up your blog. I just read 2 bloggers yesterday that moved their blogs to Wordpress because Blogger had arbitrarily done that to them. You have to fight to get it back up, proving you followed their Terms Of Service, and it’s a big hassle. Eventually what you want to do is have your blog on your own domain. This too is easier to accomplish with Wordpress.org. To get started for free and fast tho, just go to whatever platform you choose and sign up. It’s that easy. Another up and coming platform is Live Journal.

The best resources I could recommend is a free report Easy Blogging. You can download it and have for referring back to at anytime. The best website to learn everything step by step in my opinion, is Problogger. He has a 31 day lesson plan for building your blog.

The Beginning Stages

As with anything new, the beginning stages are the hardest and take the longest on the learning curve. As you get going the things you do will take less time and my posts will get shorter. LOL. If you have any comments, please feel free to leave them. Also if you find any resources you like, please feel free to share those also. I still have a lot to learn myself!