Cool Site Tricks

Use Google Site Maps? Better Read This

I uploaded 3 correctly formatted sitemaps yesterday. If it wasn’t for uploading them through Google, I’d have been waiting, and then concluding that it didn’t seem to work.

To make things worse, I could have tried it out on 100 domains and still have no result.

Why?

I uploaded my sitemap to http://www.thedomainname.com/sitemap/google.xml

I figured creating a directory called sitemap would make sense. It would be obvious what it was and wouldn’t clog up my root folder.

Big mistake.

Since I was using software, I didn’t read all the documents thoroughly.

You ever do that?

Fortunately, since I uploaded through Google, it told me there was a problem.
If I put the sitemap in a directory called sitemap then that sitemap is

only good for files in that folder and subfolder.

I would have made a BIG mistake. The pages I thought would be submitted to Google wouldn’t have been.

I’ve resubmitted and the status is OK for all of them now.

Moral: RTFM and put the sitemap in your root directory.

Rick

Want to Get More Pages In Google - Faster?

Google wants to make it easier to find all the pages of your website.
They’ve provided a free script written in Python to make it easy to generate
the sitemaps. Unfortunately the script is written in Python, and not all webhosts
support this. You also need to run it from the command line.

Fortunately there is hope. Here is a free Google Sitemap program that I use.
It’s called Gsitemap and is available at

http://www.vigos.com/products/gsitemap/

Never Assume People Know Something

I admit it. I’m guilty. There’s no way I can deny it.

I tell my clients not to assume their customers know something, and yet here I am constantly discovering that no matter how hard I try, I still commit the offense. It happened again today.

I was showing someone the nifty feature on my monitor. I’m amazed at how much it increases my productivity. So here I was showing this feature and something that I think is nothing gets all the questions. As soon as I start, I hear “Wait, how did you move your mouse across the monitors?” I reply, “I just moved it sideways.”

Use Domain Wildcarding to Shorten Urls

Which domains would you rather see:

http://exercise.example.com or http://www.example.com/exercise.html

http://computers.example.com or http://www.example.com/computers.html

http://health_news.example.com or http://www.example.com/health_news.html

By using domain wildcarding you can shorten your url and make a sub-page look like a main page.

Step 1:

First, enable wildcarding for your domain in your DNS control panel. To see if your host has already enabled this for you do this: replace www in your url with random letters. If you still see your site, wildcarding is enabled.

If it isn’t you will need to modify your Zone Record.

Example:

* IN A 66.227.119.10

Step 2:

Determine if you want to use SSI’s (server side includes) or PHP includes. What you use will be determined by what you want to do with the page.

PHP Examples:

1: If you simply want to load an existing html page use this:

$url = $_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"];
$page_to_load = explode( ".", $url);
include( $page_to_load[0] . ".html")

How to Use Clickbank's New Ranking for Competitive Intelligence

This is more of a marketing strategy than I usually post here.

I’ve long wanted Clickbank to post a list of their top 100 products. They haven’t done so. I suggested it in email, and they didn’t feel it was something they would implement.

The reason I wanted to know this information is that I wanted to get a feel for what types of products are most popular. After all, if products in Niche A consistently sell 400 copies in a week and products in Niche B only sell 5 - I want to promote Niche A.

The key thing here is “consistently.” Some products will have a big surge in sales and may make a niche seem more popular than it may be.

Gary Halbert says a key to success is to find a starving market and feed that market. Without seeing the Top 100, I can only make guesses.

With the new stats available in the MarketPlace, I can now make a more informed speculation.

How to Create A Free Simple Site Map

Site maps can be a big benefit to your site. By creating a site map you can make it easier for search engine spiders to find the pages you want them to find.

Site maps come to your rescue. There are a handful of software programs that will create site maps for you. If you have a number of sites with a fairly large amount of content, then using one of those programs is a good idea.

But if for whatever reason you don’t want to use one of those programs here’s a quick way to create them.

By putting the following code in my .htaccess file I was able to view the directory contents.

Options +Indexes
IndexOptions +FancyIndexing +SuppressHTMLPreamble +SuppressSize +SuppressDescription +SuppressLastModified ScanHTMLTitlesScanHTMLTitles

Essential Anti-Virus and Spyware Programs

I’m amazed at the number of people I talk to who don’t keep their Anti-Virus definitions up to date. They’ll get Norton Anti-virus with their machine and when the trial period is up, they don’t feel like paying to keep the definitions current.

Well if you don’t want to pay there are two alternatives that will allow you to keep your definitions current.

The first is AVG Anti-Virus by Grisoft http://www.grisoft.com http://www.grisoft.com/doc/40/lng/us/tpl/tpl01

The second is Avast http://avast.com/index.html http://www.avast.com/eng/down_home.html

These are both free for home use.

One also needs to protect their computer from Spyware.

I used to use Spybot: Search and Destroy and Adaware.

I have now switched to Spysweeper by WebRoot. This program requires a paid subscription to keep spyware definitions up to date.

Personalized PDF - On The Fly

Ever wanted a way to create a mail in coupon with your affiliates id and an expiration date on it?

Well, now you can.

Ever wanted your affiliates to be able to create branded documents on the fly?

Well, now you can.

The PHP code allowing you to do this is now available to members of this site.

Give your affiliates the ability to post a link to their own PDF branded version?

In the example below, I’ve pulled sample data from a database to populate the fields.

http://coolsitetricks.com/demo/affiliate.php/1001 Ex. 1

http://coolsitetricks.com/demo/affiliate.php/1003 Ex. 2

Later this week I will post the code so that the PDF is forced to download and not open in their browser.

PHP and HTML includes - Combined with Dreamweaver templates

In the article “This is so simple, why don’t more websites do it?” I talked about the benefits of include files. Since then, I’ve had some people ask me how to do this with a Dreamweaver template, or with a PHP page. You’ll be surprised at how much time you can save, when you use Dreamweaver templates with include files.

If you don’t use Dreamweaver, don’t worry. This concept can still be used and I’ve included examples you can use.

Here is how you use include files with Dreamweaver.

Dreamweaver Template:

The majority of my sites will have the following:

header
subheader
navigation bar - left, right or both sides
footer
content area

Since the header, subheader, navigation bar and footer are common for multiple pages I put that html in separate files.

One of the questions I was asked was, “Why not simply modify the Dreamweaver template and it will modify all your pages? Doing it this way, means you don’t have to use include files and possibly have a longer load time.”

My response was, “That’s fine for a site that’s under 25 pages. How long is it going to take me to add, a new link to my footer on the site that as 17,567 different pages?” First I have to wait for Dreamweaver to modify all the pages and then reupload. That’s terribly inefficient. I’ve not experienced any delay in page loading on any page that has includes on it.

How to Create On the Fly PDF Documents

Yes it’s possible to create on the fly PDF documents without having to spend a fortune.

This system is designed to let affiliates get branded PDF documents quickly and easily.

Best of all, as a member of this site you’re going to get the source code for FREE. Yes, that’s right - free. There’s no catch. Membership in this site is free, and as soon as a member of the site you’ll be able to download the code. I will be posting the code on Mar 22.

Here’s an overview of what you can do with this system:

Offer a salesletter for use with offline orders - your affiliate id is included
create a time sensitive coupon that must be faxed in
created branded lead generator ebooks