• Increasing the visibility of all pages of your website (for users and search engines alike)
• Providing a straightforward navigation structure that helps customers find the product, service, or information they are looking for on demand
• Allowing a webmaster to strategically use target keywords to improve your site’s organic search rankings
• Directing the search engine spiders to all the webpages on the website, ensuring page indexing of each webpage
• Helping in the monitoring and correcting of broken links

Getting a Sitemap ready should ideally go with your ecommerce development. If the case may not match, i.e. you have a ready website and then you realize that there is a sudden need of a Sitemap, you need not worry as there are tools that dynamically generate an HTML Sitemap for your website. A point to be noted here is to stay consistent while designing a Sitemap.

Clearly we are creating a link mine for the search engines in a Sitemap. So we need to take care in putting up what the search engines like most – text, text, and more text. Hence a text-based Sitemap is the best solution for your ecommerce website. Moreover you have that pleasure to put in a truck load of keywords with links and make it look like it isn’t stuffed at the same time! The design should be such that it gives the user an idea if the link is a sub-page of other webpage. Most importantly, give a link to the Sitemap from each page of your website. Lastly, since you have an ecommerce website make sure you keep updating the Sitemap as and when you add and/or remove products and pages from the website, lest occurrence of broken links and missing webpages.

Stage One: Setting Corporate and Business-Unit Strategy. Corporate strategy addresses the interrelationship between the various business units in a firm, including decisions about which units should be kept, sold, or augmented. Business-unit strategy focuses on how a particular unit in the company attacks a market to gain competitive advantage. Stage Two: Framing the Market Strategy. Stage two entails the analysis of market opportunities and an initial first pass of the business concept—that is, collecting sufficient online and offline data to establish the burden of proof of opportunity assessment. Stage Three: Formulating the Marketing Strategy. Internet marketing strategy is based upon corporate, business-unit, and overall marketing strategies of the firm. The marketing strategy goals, resources, and sequencing of actions must be tightly aligned with the business-unit strategy. Finally, the overall marketing strategy comprises both offline and online marketing activities.

Stage Four: Designing the Customer Experience. Firms must understand the type of customer experience that needs to be delivered to meet the market opportunity. The experience should correlate with the firm’s positioning and marketing strategy. Thus, the design of the customer experience constitutes a bridge between the high-level marketing strategy (step three) and the marketing program tactics (step five).

Stage Five: Designing the Marketing Program. Stage five entails designing a particular combination of marketing actions (termed levers) to move target customers from awareness to commitment. The framework used to accomplish this task is the Marketspace Matrix. The Internet marketer has six classes of levers (e.g., pricing, community) that can be used to create target customer awareness, exploration, and commitment to the firm’s offering.

Stage Six: Crafting the Customer Interface. The Internet has shifted the locus of the exchange from the Marketplace (i.e., face-to-face interaction) to the Marketspace (i.e., screen-to-face interaction). The key difference is that the nature of the exchange relationship is now mediated by a technology interface. This interface can be a desktop PC, subnotebook, personal digital assistant, mobile phone, wireless applications protocol (WAP) device, or other Internet-enabled appliance.

Stage Seven: Evaluating the Marketing Program. This last stage involves the evaluation of the overall Internet marketing program. This includes a balanced focus on both customer and financial metrics. It emphasizes customer actions as well as financial metrics used to track the success of marketing programs.

URL rewriting can significantly boost your website’s search engine friendliness by changing the long, unreadable, and tough to remember URLs to convenient and succinct names. There are a lot of guides to be found on the Internet, but none come even close to this one. This post is a comprehensive know-how for URL rewriting.

Uniform Resource Locator or URL foe short is the address to your website through which a user can visit your site using the Internet. There are two types of websites – Static and Dynamic. Thus gives rise to two types URLs with the same names respectively. The Static URLs are easy to understand and remember as they are hard written by the webmaster during the Static webpage generation. The problem arises in Dynamic URL writing. A Dynamic URL tells the site exactly what information to show to the user by including variables in the URL itself. It is these variables that make life difficult and create misery in reading these URLs by the user as well as the browser. A typical Dynamic URL looks like this:

http://www.google.co.in/#hl=en&q=hello+world&meta=&aq=f&oq=hello+world&fp=c5b9ba6cbe6cba1e

As you will see these URLs do give us the nightmares, so webmasters have come out with a solution for this by introducing a technique called URL rewriting wherein the obscure Dynamic URLs are rewritten to match their Static counterparts. The cleaner and shorter version of the URL is much easier to read, understand and remember. The URL must tell you what page or file it refers to and the rewritten Dynamic URL does that precisely. Search engines and users alike get all the useful information they require from these cleaner URLs. A typical rewritten Dynamic URL will look like this:

http://bit.ly/hello_world-google_search

Now, clearly, one can read and correctly predict what the URL might be referring to – in this case the Google search for “hello world”. The former longer and absurd Dynamic URL too refers to the same page (follow the link to see where it points), but could you decode it at the first glance, majorly no. So now that we have laid foundations of what is URL rewriting and why to do it, we shall delve further into the tools and techniques of URL rewriting.Remember hyphens are treated as spaces by the search engines while underscores are not, hence remember these thumb rules, as you would like to remember them as, while rewriting Dynamic URLs.

Web Server Support

Before launching ourselves into the core of URL rewriting we shall discuss about the web servers that your websites run on and their support to understand your rewritten URLs. One thing to mention here would be that unlike the search engines, a server cannot easily understand rewritten URLs and thus, they have to be in a sense “translated” to be understood by the server. In order to do that all you need to do is provide an access to your rewriting module for the web server. The access depends on what server you are using.

If you are using the Apache server, there is no need of granting an explicit access to your URL rewriting module as the Apache server comes with its own in-built URL rewriting module – mod_rewrite enabled. This is hassle-free working with URL rewriting and uploading correct formatted files to your Apache server. For more information on mod_rewrite module, its enabling and working, there’s a forum here.

Now, seemingly, the Microsoft IIS is the devil that you may want to avoid while rewriting a URL. IIS does not have the default URL rewriting capability as that of Apache. But nothing to worry here, as the IIS does support add-ons that give it prosthetic URL rewriting capabilities. One closest to mod_rewrite is the ISAPI_Rewrite add-on for IIS. To understand the installation and configuration of ISAPI_Rewrite please visit its online instructions manual.

Basics of URL Rewriting

Before all you may ask why do all this perspiring work? Well, the main thing we target here in rewriting a URL is making it search engine friendly. Our website should rank higher up the Google index. Google likes, no wait, Google loves a well-structured folder hierarchy. So to play the SEO game, we need to play by the rules and follow Google’s nomenclature system.

Up till now you have learnt all about what a Dynamic URL is and why and how to rename it. Another thing to remember is that the name changing has to happen internally on the server, i.e. the address bar on the browser will be showing the old long, and monotonous URL even when you click the smart new one. The server will redirect all requests in the name of rewritten URLs page having the older version of the URL – the Dynamic version. This can be done by modifying the .htaccess documents.

The last thing to mention here is the common mistakes that people tend to make while rewriting URLs. Please keep the following points in mind as not doing so may result in a fatal broken link and your webpage could disappear from the Internet, even though it shows on the server.

• Session IDs: What are those? e967ef2d7f923aab20e10ddb4164a351 ? It’s a session ID. It’s different for every user so every user has a different address.
• Apostrophes and other special characters: %e2%80%93 – This is an apostrophe in a URL.
• Numbers instead of speaking URLs: Decide, 123 or full-website-sitemap, which URL speaks your language, which one you’ll rather click?
• Multiple URLs for one page: www.example.com, example.com, example.com/, example.com/index.php, example.com/index.php? All leading to one homepage? No you have 6 homepages and counting! Use a canonical URL script (WordPress 2.5 already does by default).
• Too many parameters which also change randomly. Dozens of combinations are possible for passing parameters. This is even worse than the point above.
• Use only relevant keywords in URL.
• Avoid too many subdirectories or huge link depths.
• Changing URLs after publication: It is really silly to change URLs after publishing a page and getting traffic on it.

There is no rocket science involved in embedding the Google Maps API into your webpage. All you need to know is exactly where you need to put the map for the public display and use. Other things are managed by Google for you. Just follow the following steps and you will have a seamless integration of the Google Maps API on your page in no time.

1. Sign up for a Google API key.

You are required to accept the Google terms and conditions, provide the URL of the website that you are going to embed the Google Maps API in, and confirm the registration to get the API key. You can apply for the key at http://www.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html.

By checking the agreement box, entering the URL, and pressing the “Generate API key” button, you will get an API key that looks like this:

Save this key in some text file as you will need this key to integrate it in the scripts to generate the maps.

2. Incorporating the Google Map.

Incorporating the Google Map is really simple now that you have your API key. Copy the following code and paste it into your HTML file where you want your Google Maps API to perform.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
      "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
    <script src="http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&v=1
            &key=<YOUR_API_KEY_HERE>">
    </script>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div style="width: 400px; height: 300px"></div>
    <script>
//<![CDATA[
    var map = new GMap(document.getElementById("map"));
    map.centerAndZoom(new GPoint((37.38216158779348, -122.08145141601562)3);
//]]>
    </script>
  </body>
</html>

The <YOUR_API_KEY_HERE> is to be replaced by you API key provided by Google on confirmation as mentioned above. Executing this script will show Google Headquarters at Mountain View, CA as the center of the map. You can change the default center of the map by replacing the geographical coordinates in the

map.centerAndZoom(new GPoint((37.38216158779348, -122.08145141601562)3);

line. (37.38216158779348, -122.08145141601562) are the coordinates of Google Headquarters.

View Larger Map

Save and upload the file on a web server and then you are ready to roll.