Our Simple And Free Method For Submitting Sitemaps

Creating sitemaps for your site is a very important part of ensuring that the search engines can spider your site easily and know the most about its pages. You can view ProductCritic's sitemap at http://www.productcritic.com/sitemap.xml

At ProductCritic, we mostly care about Google and Yahoo! since these two sites combine for more than 80% of the search traffic to the site. If you have not done so already, you should set up your sites at both Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com

Once you've set up your sites and verified that you own them (I've found that the easiest way to do this is to upload their generated html file to your site vs using a meta-tag), it's time to create and upload a sitemap.

When we first launched the main site, we tried some free sitemap generators (just do a search at Google and you'll find a ton of them). The free online one that we found was the best was XML-Sitemaps.com. Still, I found it a pain to generate it online, download the resulting files, and then upload them to our server. Also, while free, XML-Sitemaps.com only has a 500 URL limit.

So, I found a Windows application that does the job very quickly, is FREE and has a ton of advanced features if you want to use them. It's called GSiteCrawler and can be found at http://gsitecrawler.com/. The author, John Mueller, lives in Switzerland and works on the software on the side. Although he offers the software for free, I definitely believe that once you use it, you will want to make a donation to him for the time and effort he's devoted to the project.

Once you install it, just "Create A New Project" and it will walk you through a mere four screens in its New Project Wizard. Using the wizard, you have tons of options to tell it what type of files and urls to crawl on your site. You can choose file extensions of files you want crawled, images, and videos. You can also choose to upload the sitemaps directly to your ftp server once the files have been generated. See the options you have in the four screencaps that follow.




Once you have generated your sitemaps and uploaded them to your site, you need to let Google and Yahoo! know that there is a new sitemap that the search engines should use to crawl your site.

Do this on Google Webmaster Tools by choosing the "sitemap" tab and either "Add a Sitemap" link at the top right or once you've added it, just select that file (click on the box next to the sitemap name) and click on the "Resubmit Selected" button.

For Yahoo! Site Explorer, click on the "Manage" button next to the sitename and add the name of the sitemap file (usually "sitemap.xml") to the feed.

It's quite simple and you should make a point of updating your sitemap when there's new content for the search engines to crawl.

Your Rank In Search Results...How To Compare Against Competitors

Since launching ProductCritic last month, I've learned a lot from other bloggers about various terms and tools that you should use to optimize, improve, and gather information about your site or blog.

What is SERP? It stands for Search Engine Results Pages. SERP tools help you gather information on where your site ranks on the search engines for various search terms. My favorite SERP tool is Shoemoney's Serps Script. It's really free, fast, has nothing extraneous, and works great for comparing where ProductCritic ranks against its competitors. I also use it to compare the rankings for ProducCritic against one of the largest technology review sites on the Internet....CNET.

Not surprisingly, for a site that only launched a month ago, ProductCritic doesn't rank at all for the generic and most popular keyword searches like "digital camera review". What is surprising to me is that some of the "long tail" terms (I'll post a blog entry on short tails, long tails, and hittail next week) rank incredibly well for ProductCritic and we actually beat CNET for those terms!

For example, using Shoemoney's SERP tool, I found that for the search term "vpc-hd1a review" (one of the camcorders on the site), ProductCritic ranked #4 on Google and #8 on MSN while CNET, for the same search term, ranked #9 on Google and #22 on MSN. Disappointingly, for the same search term, ProductCritic doesn't even rank on Yahoo! but CNET is ranked #1 on there. Nevertheless, I'm greatly encouraged that, for some terms, a new site like ProductCritic can rank higher than a site like CNET for the same relevance of content.

Even more encouraging for me is that the same searches for ProductCritic competitors (like wize.com) show up at #41 on Google and don't even rank on MSN (some didn't rank on any search sites). We obviously still have lots of work to do for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) but Shoemoney's SERP tool helps us quickly compare ourselves against other sites and gauge our progress as the months go by.

Shoemoney is one of the most successful Google Adsense publishers on the net with hundreds of sites and thousands of domain names. Providing something like his SERPs tool is impressive to me as he provides it for free and it helps many other bloggers and site owners using his success as inspiration to continue to work hard.

Is This The Best New Way To Promote A Site?

This blog exists to promote our main site, ProductCritic. We're quite open about this and the name of this blog should be clue enough.

As I've written about previousely, we use a variety of strategies to promote the growth of ProductCritic. I've just started to use another method that I'm hoping will help gain some backlinks from the second most popular search engine...Yahoo!

How do you do this? Use Yahoo! Answers. I've started reading some of the questions in the Consumer Electronics category (specifically Cameras, Camcorders, and Cell Phones). There appear to be quite a lot of questions in the form of "Which of these digital cameras is the best?" and "Is the Nikon D40 better than the Canon 20D?"

I provide honest answers to questions that I know something about and provide a link to the relevant products on ProductCritic and their ProductCritic Scores. I believe this can genuinely help people answer their questions while at the same time providing a plug for ProductCritic. I'll know that this isn't just a tactic to merely troll for links when one of the people asking a question picks my answer as the best one that answered their question.

Best of all, this should help raise the profile of ProductCritic since Yahoo will crawl their own site, right?

What do people think of this method? Leave a comment!

7 Steps To Promote ProductCritic

We launched ProductCritic earlier this month. When you launch a site, you should have no illusions about how long it might take for the site to be "successful". It's completely understandable to create a site just to make money but if that's all you are in it for, then you will probably be disappointed.

If you're going to apply so much of your energy and time into a site (and you will, if you want people to visit it), then ensure that you have what it takes to be in it for the long run. If it's a blog, update regularly, be creative, and spend time with it. For ProductCritic, believe it or not, our main reason for creating it was NOT merely to make some $$'s. Before buying a consumer electronic (like a Digital Camera), I do tons of research to make myself comfortable that I'm spending money on something that I'm going to be happy with. I got tired of keeping track of all the different reviews and not really remembering what different reviewers said about the products. I got even more tired with my friends and family asking me, "what should I buy?" That's how ProductCritic was born.

Now, of course, after launching the site, I do want it to become a site that other people also find useful. So, here's a list of all the things I've done so far to promote the site:

1. Submit to Search Engines - Instead of submitting to every engine I can find, I submitted to Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Right now, about 80% of the visits from search engines come from Google. Doing this correctly is the subject of all the SEO blogs and I agree it's one of the most important things you can do well to promote your site.
2. Started ProductCriticBlog (this blog) - you'll notice that there's no ads on this blog. At this point, the blog's purpose is not to earn money, it is to help promote the main site (ProductCritic).
3. MyBlogLog - A cool social networking site for bloggers. It just got purchased by Yahoo.
4. del.icio.us - I went to add the link to ProductCritic here but, to my surprise, it had already been added by other people who had somehow stumbled on it within days of the site launch.
5. StumbleUpon - Speaking of stumbling upon it, I added ProductCritic here so that once in awhile, someone could just run into the site while actually "browsing" the web.
6. DMOZ - The Open Directory Project - it just reopened for submitting URL's but although I've submitted, ProductCritic is still not yet listed in it yet.
7. SpicyPage - This is a pretty new site that allows people to submit their site and people can vote on it and comment on it.

Finally, I can't stress this enough...make your site useful! It's more important than where you place your ads or what size the ads are. Your visitors are spending a bit of their precious time on your site. Make sure that they get a good return for their investment in time. As long as you are genuine and you try your best to produce high quality content, the site promotion will take care of itself as people tell their contacts about your site.

I'm still pretty new to this, leave a comment for promotion techniques that you've found work for you.

Official Launch of ProductCritic.com!

We've sent out the announcement to people who signed up on the site and have officially launched ProductCritic.com.

Need an easy way to determine whether a specific Digital Camera, Camcorder, or Cell Phone is worth it? ProductCritic is a free site that gives you one location to find professional reviews of a particular product. The site also calculates a score of all the reviews and summarizes them to come up with the ProductCritic Score for each product.

If you are currently evaluating a few brands or models and trying to make a decision about which Digital Camera, Camcorder, or Cell Phone to purchase, you will immediately benefit from ProductCritic. You only need to compare the ProductCritic Scores to get a good idea if professional reviewers generally rate one product better than another.

Finally, all the expert reviews of a product are linked from the site so you no longer need to go searching the Internet for all the reviews. You'll be confident that you haven't missed any reviews which could help you make the right decision.

We think you'll find the site as useful as we do.

HappyCodr - A Showcase Opportunity for ProductCritic

HappyCodr is a site that aims to be the main showcase for sites designed with Ruby on Rails. The guys at Start Us Up! have done a great job in providing a place for Rails developers to promote their hard work.

We're excited to have an opportunity to promote ProductCritic to the rest of the development community. HappyCodr's list of submitted sites is also a great place to see all the great work that other developers are doing.