Having a sitemap on your website is no longer a question of ‘if’ or ‘why’, but rather about ‘when.’ That is, there are many benefits that website owners get from this simple act that can even be automated with the help of a sitemap generator. It is not only good for your SEO, but also highly recommended for a better user experience in the long run. If you have just created a new website or included fresh pages, it is paramount that you ensure the pages are easily discoverable. You can make this happen by creating a sitemap, submitting it to the search engines of your choice (start with Google) and then updating it.

A content inventory is one of the most important phases during content management system changes, upgrades or website redesigns. The inventory also doubles as a useful long-term content management tool. Without a clear understanding of why you are undertaking a content inventory, your expected results and who your target audience is, it is quite easy to find the exercise confusing.  Here are some of the considerations you need to make before embarking on the process.

There are three main varieties of ways to create sitemaps. The choice will depend on a number of factors, ranging from the nature of your website, content quantity, intended outcome, among others. Note that you can easily create sitemap using a sitemap generator.

• Indexed Sitemap: This is a directory or an alphabetical listing of your site’s pages.
• Complete Categorical Sitemap: This is the most popular comprehensive sitemap with classified links into categories. It is much easier to search for information and you can easily move between categories.
• Restricted Categorical: Here, all links in a specific category are displayed at a go. However, all links of a website are not shown as is the case with categorical sitemap and therefore limits the lists links in some categories which simplifies viewing and doesn’t strain the eyes.

Marketing your website for free can be possible if you have a high search visibility. Having good backlinks is a great way to get a higher rank when it comes to SEO. There are many factors that can have an impact on a website’s SEO, and backlinks are an important one. Backlinks are when one site links to another site. If a website has a link that leads visitors to your website, this can help you to get a higher ranking in SEO.

Content is the heart and soul of a company’s website. Without good content, your website will not be successful, and your business will likely have a difficult time sustaining in this ever-changing world. With so many businesses and websites out there, customers will go where they feel comfortable. When your website content is not inviting or helpful, they will take their business elsewhere. This is why it is so important to make sure you strategize before publishing your website. Planning what kind of content your website will have and how you will present it can only help you to be more prepared for what lies ahead. With both technology and the world constantly changing, you will need to make sure your website content is keeping up with the competition that is out there.

Planning will help you to determine what goals your company has and how you would like to meet them through setting up your website and having it go live. It will also assist you in targeting the audiences and demographics you want to reach. Depending on the size of your business, you will want to consider what areas you want to reach. Knowing and understanding your audience is also part of the content planning, and it will help you choose the best content that speaks to people and draws them in. In addition, planning allows you to test out your content before spending the time and money on coding. This way, you can find what works and what doesn’t work. Fix problems before they become detrimental to your business. No one ever regretted planning ahead.

For anyone who has an established website with good traffic and search rankings, the greatest challenge of a website redesign is reaching or surpassing the current algorithms so rankings and traffic is not lost. That is generally not an easy task, and for good reasons. Let's look at the top 10 website redesign mistakes site owners usually make.

Copying another person’s work is not only morally wrong but can ruin your reputation. There are many tools on the internet that can be used to catch plagiarism before it is published. If you are a web designer who would like to make sure you are not overstepping your boundaries or a publisher that would like to check in on your clients’ work, these tools can be extremely helpful in detecting plagiarism. Many professors and students from high schools and college use these online plagiarism tools in order to check their work. There are so many articles out there these days, and it is important to make sure your work or the work of your students is original.

Professors, editors, students, and people from many other professions rely on these tools in order to make sure they are producing original work that will not violate plagiarism. Plagiarism may not always be committed on purpose. It is possible that it happens accidentally due to the fact that there is so much text on the internet with social media and blogging.

The tools are not only helpful—they are easy to use, and the best part is they are free. It is worth it to take the time before submitting your work. While they don’t take a lot of time to use, it is an extra step to remember before completing an assignment. It is a step that might save you hassle in the long run.

The speed of a website often determines how likely we are to stay on it. In fact, for some us, speed is even more important than the look of the site. It can be extremely annoying to have to wait for a page to load, and more often than not, we lost interest pretty quickly and move on.

This is bad for business. If you want customers to linger just a little bit longer on your products, if you want your SEO rankings to remain competitive and generally provide a better experience to the visitors of your site, then speed should be somewhere near the top of your priority list.

If you own a site or are thinking of starting one, you’ve likely come across the idea of “user experience.” User experience, or UX, is an integral feature of website design and layout. After all, when you visit a site online, you want to enjoy the experience. You don’t want the web pages you’re viewing to be crowded with too much information or ads, and you certainly don’t want to have to hunt for the information you need either.

So when it comes to owning, managing, or building a site, UX is an important consideration. But as you may well know, not everyone experiences life—both online and offline—in the same way. What works for some does not necessarily work for others.

There’s a running joke that in order to become a UX expert, you need to have experience, curiosity, a portfolio, superior communication and research skills, a working knowledge of social psychology and… the list goes on.

All jokes aside, UX isn’t about learning just one formula. There is no one master trick. Mastering UX means knowing about a wide range of things—hence the “requirement” of curiosity.

Lucky for you, you won’t have to enroll in several courses and complete two or three degrees. Learning UX has never been easier than right now.

What blogs do you read, and how do they help you shape your blog or website? The type of blogs (and specific blogs) you read or subscribe to can influence your site development. But did you know that they can also help you with your website optimization?

Having access to a list that compares blogs according to their search engine optimization ranking allows you as a blogger (or website owner, for that matter) to check up on what SEO trends are working the best. This access, in turn, allows you to adjust your optimization methods and marketing plans, and start implementing successful changes.

On the other hand, perhaps you’re an SEO expert or looking to become an SEO freelancer. Maybe you’ve been promoted at work or transferred, and need to start brushing up on SEO trends as part of your new position’s responsibilities.

As with most aspects of online marketing schemes, the realm of SEO tends to evolve on an almost constant basis. Most of the evolving trends won’t require much change on your part, but others most definitely will. In fact, thanks to recent developments in the voice search capabilities of search engines (as an example), updating your SEO methodology has become a requirement rather than an option. Due to the change in how search engines interact with your site, a host of new features and functions have been introduced.

These days, almost everyone is online. We don’t just browse for information, watch YouTube videos, play BuzzFeed quizzes, and interact on social media either. Today, almost everything can be done online, including buying and selling commerce.

Ecommerce isn’t anything new, of course. It’s been around since 1991, when the internet was made available for commercial use. But what has certainly changed is the sheer number of ecommerce sites available.

Just as almost everyone is buying online, the vast majority of internet users are also selling online. While many make use of sites such as Gumtree, an increasing number of people are starting up their own ecommerce sites. One of the obvious reasons is that with an online store, you simply don’t have all of the overhead expenses of a brick and mortar shop.

A sitemap generator is a specific type of software that can automatically create a list of pages that are contained within a website or online application. Designing a totally new website or redesigning an existing website can be a daunting process, and a sitemap generator can take a significant amount of work off of the shoulders of the webmaster by creating the sitemap in just a few clicks. Sitemap generators can be used right in the browser or some come as programs that are downloaded. Gone are the days of manually creating sitemaps with no other option—though some may still opt to do this. Sitemap generators allow websites of all sizes to quickly and accurately obtain essentially a map of their content and how each piece relates to other pieces so that work can be performed on the website when needed.

User Experience, also known as UX, is absolutely one of the fastest growing and possibly most exciting parts of the interactive industry. There are many facets to a career in the user experience, and all of them are deeply rooted in a passion for not only knowing users, but being able to shape their experiences into the best that they can possibly be. In this guide for UX careers, you will find essential information about the various career opportunities around UX, the national benchmarks set for such salaries, the best areas for jobs in UX, and essential tools of the trade for those User Experience professionals.

By definition, UX (or user experience) refers to how a person feels about their interactions with a specific product or service. It can include their emotions that have been generated from the experience or their attitude and feelings in relation to it. It can be completely subjective to each individual due to how people think, feel, or interpret things differently from one another. What works perfectly for one person can be highly unappealing to another. This can make it difficult for a company or brand to meet the needs of each individual person their product or service reaches.

How to get your videos to rank in search engines

In order to get the information for search results, Google uses crawlers that search the internet and gather information from each piece of content. Most times the top results are videos, and Google works to help its users find the videos that are most useful to them. Each day, there are millions of users online and looking for videos, so why not work to make yours one of the best.

It sounds like something out of a science fiction movie, but unlike some of the technology used in sci-fi blockbusters—like the flying cars from Back To The Future 2—voice search is not something we can only expect to have in the next few centuries.

In 2014, Google commissioned a study by Northstar Research to look into the rising popularity of voice search technology. 1400 American citizens across a range of age groups were asked to participate in a survey, which showed that teens—as always—were ahead of the curve in taking advantage of the then-new innovation.

Not only is the function more popular with the younger generation (55% of teens as opposed to 41% of adults), they’ve also explored new ways to integrate voice search in their everyday lives.

Brick and mortar stores are legally required to be accessible. What does accessibility mean? According to state accessibility laws, all individuals with disabilities are ensured different opportunities as those without. The Americans with Disabilities Act forbids discrimination based on infirmities in public employment, accommodations, transportation, commercial facilities, telecommunications, and state and local government. For example, a wheelchair must be able to fit through doorways. It only makes sense for stores to have to accommodate anyone and everyone, but what about the internet?

Extensions for sitemaps are an added syntax for certain media types that are contained within a sitemap. These media types would be images, videos, and other hard to break down content that is contained within the site, and the extensions are used to improve its indexing. A byproduct of the improved indexing, the sitemap extensions will provide information from tags on the elements to aid in making the website more accessible. In short, the extensions are used for content that is not just simply words or text in a default language.

There are 9 sitemap formats that are supported by Google's Webmaster Tools. Sitemaps allow for a webmaster to inform various search engines about website links on a website that are available to be crawled. The sitemaps also provide information to webmasters about each URL in an XML file. The additional details include when the URL was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is when compared to other URLs in the website. This will allow search engines to crawl the site more efficiently. There are varying ways to generate sitemaps depending on the type of website or content that is being posted. This is necessary because content audits use the sitemaps to crawl, thus providing information on how to make it better. Allowing the correct sitemap types not only lends to a more successful website crawl, but also to better success in search engines.

A Content Inventory is simply a list that contains all of the content on a website. The inventory will typically include all text, images, applications, and documents. In order to gain knowledge from the inventory, it is necessary to assess each individual piece of content. Doing this will aid in understanding what exactly is on the site, if it is in the proper location, and if the content is up-to-date. Before the invention of content inventory tools, performing this process would be almost painstaking, and not completely free from errors. Whether someone was performing the content inventory by hand or entering it into a spreadsheet, there is always room for mistakes. With the invention of content inventory tools, like those provided by DYNO Mapper, anyone that has access to the internet can perform a content inventory. This will jumpstart the process of a website redesign, or will simply give the webmaster a look into the sitemap of the website. Once a website's content inventory is assessed, the webmaster can refer back to it when comparing progress on the new site map or redesign of the website.