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.

Get Full Referral URL's Despite Using Analytics

As I've mentioned in previous posts, I'm completely addicted to the stats generated by ProductCritic. Maybe it's just the fact that we gain knowledge on areas we need to tweak for the site (and we're tweaking on an almost daily basis).

Besides the server logs (which I don't check all the time), we use Google Analytics as our main source of information about visits to the site. Analytics provides a large amount of data and first time users of this tool can easily find themselves overwhelmed.

Although I look at almost all areas of Analytics from time to time, I mainly focus my daily stats fix on two areas. The first is Visitor Segment Performance/Referring Source. I want to know where visitors to ProductCritic are coming from. It's been quite useful as we've immediately been able to determine when someone links to ProductCritic and where that link exists.


The second area that I use in Analytics is Search Engine Marketing/CPC vs Organic Conversion. Although we currently don't use Adwords, this section is still extremely useful for us as it provides us with the ability to see what keywords people are using to find ProductCritic via searches (hence "Organic Convesion"). Since we get a majority of our traffic from search engines, the information here gives us some indication about whether we should concentrate more effort on aggregating reviews for digital cameras, camcorders, or cell phones.

So, what does all this have to do with getting full referral URL's? Well, that's one thing that Google Analytics does NOT do well. For example, last week, we noticed a sharp spike of referrals from the forums at dpreview.com. Although Analytics showed us the referrals, we couldn't tell EXACTLY where they came from (only that they came from forums.dpreview.com). We could check the server logs, but if you don't have access to them, there's an easier way.....sign on and use HitTail.com. It's an awesome free service and although most people use it primarily for keyword suggestions, the tool gives you every referral URL in full detail. Since it also does this for searches, you can click on the links that HitTail.com gives you to exactly reproduce the searches that people use (including ones from localized versions of Google).

Note that we're not affiliated in any way with HitTail.com....it's just a great FREE tool that everyone who's serious about tweaking their site for optimal revenue should use.

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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!

Yahoo Challenging Google Adwords

PC World has an article about Yahoo's revamped Sponsored Search. I haven't tried Google Adwords yet as I'm still trying to figure out what keywords I'd use for ProductCritic. Since Yahoo only has 22% of the US search market vs. Google's 63%, you might be able to buy keywords for cheaper with Yahoo's Sponsored Search. Since you can't use Adsense and Yahoo ads together on the same site (even if they don't appear on the same page), I'm sticking with Adsense until I have a much better sense of what's working and what isn't.

One of the tools I'm using to determine the best keywords is HitTail. I'll provide more details in a followup post detailing some of the tools and sites I'm using the manage this blog and the main ProductCritic site.

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.

Organically Grown Website - Is it Possible?

Before we officially launch ProductCritic, I'm going to see how many people can stumble upon the site without us linking it from anywhere. Besides putting up a tag on TagACloud, I haven't placed a link to ProductCritic anywhere else on the web.

Today though, I noticed two things. First, a spike up in traffic to the site (which I've only told some friends and family about). Looking at the referrals, I noticed that the visits came from a blog called Web 2.0 Magazine. After digging around a bit, I noticed that in a blog entry talking about Web 2.0 sites, a comment had been put up with a link to ProductCritic. That's where all the links came from!

The second interesting thing I noted related to organic growth of the site is that I did a search on del.icio.us and someone had added a bookmark to ProductCritic already! As of this writing, 14 people have saved the url to their bookmarks. I would have thought that most of the 14 people came from the above blog referral but actually the ProductCritic link was entered into del.icio.us before the blog entry comment link. That tells me someone found the site useful enough already to bookmark it.

We're focused on the usefulness of the site. We feel that if the site is useful, people will visit it, bookmark it, and tell others about it. Overall, a great learning experience for us so far.