A Google Sitemap is a very simple XML document that lists all the pages in your website, but the Google Sitemaps program is actually much more important than that. In fact, the Sitemaps program provides a little peek inside Google’s mind – and it can tell you a lot about what Google thinks of your website!

Why Should You Use Google Sitemaps?

Until Google Sitemaps was released in the summer of 2005, optimizing a site for Google was a guessing game at best. A website’s page might be deleted from the index, and the Webmaster had no idea why. Alternatively, a site’s content could be scanned, but because of the peculiarities of the algorithm, the only pages that would rank well might be the “About Us” page, or the company’s press releases.

As webmasters we were at the whim of Googlebot, the seemingly arbitrary algorithmic kingmaker that could make or break a website overnight through shifts in search engine positioning. There was no way to communicate with Google about a website – either to understand what was wrong with it, or to tell Google when something had been updated.

That all changed about a year ago when Google released Sitemaps, but the program really became useful in February of 2006 when Google updated it with a couple new tools.

So, what exactly is the Google Sitemaps program, and how can you use it to improve the position of your website? Well, there are essentially two reasons to use Google Sitemaps:

1. Sitemaps provide you with a way to tell Google valuable information about your website

2. You can use Sitemaps to learn what Google thinks about your website

What You Can Tell Google About Your Site

Believe it or not, Google is concerned about making sure webmasters have a way of communicating information that is important about their sites. Although Googlebot does a pretty decent job of finding and cataloging web pages, it has very little ability to rate the relative importance of one page versus another. After all, many important pages on the Internet are not properly “optimized”, and many of the people who couldn’t care less about spending their time on linking campaigns create some of the best content.

Therefore, Google gives you the ability to tell them on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0 how important a given page is relative to all the others. Using this system, you might tell Google that your home page is a 1.0, each of your product sections is a 0.8, and each of your individual product pages is a 0.5. Pages like your company’s address and contact information might only rate a 0.2.

You can also tell Google how often your pages are updated and the date that each page was last modified. For example your home page might be updated every day, while a particular product page might only be updated on an annual basis.

What Google Can Tell You About Your Site

Having the ability to tell Google all this information is important, but you don’t even need to create a sitemap file in order to enjoy some of the perks of having a Google Sitemaps account.

That’s because even without a Sitemap file, you can still learn about any errors that Googlebot has found on your website. As you probably know, your site doesn’t have to be “broken” for a robot to have trouble crawling it’s pages. Google Sitemaps will tell you about pages it was unable to crawl and links it was unable to follow. Therefore, you can see where these problems are and fix them before your pages get deleted from the index.

You can also get information on the types of searches people are using to find your website. Of course, most website analytics tools will give this information to you anyway, but if the tool you use doesn’t have this feature, then it’s always nice to get it for free from Google.

But the best part of the Sitemaps program is the Page analysis section that was added in February of 2006. This page gives you two lists of words. The first list contains the words that Googlebot associates with your website based on content on your site. The second list contains words that Googlebot has found linking to your site!

Unfortunately, Google limits the number of words in each list to 20. As a consequence, the inbound links column is partly wasted by words such as “http”, “www”, and “com” – terms that apply equally to all websites (hey Google, how about suppressing those terms from the report?). That said, this list does provide you with a way to judge the effectiveness of your offsite optimization efforts.

When you compare these two lists, you can get an understanding of what Google thinks your website is about. If the words on your Site Content column are not really what you want Googlebot to think about your site, then you know you need to tweak your website’s copy to make it more focused on your core competency.

If, on the other hand your inbound links don’t contain any keywords that you want to rank well for, then perhaps you should focus your efforts in that direction.

Above all else, you really want these two lists to agree. You want your inbound linked words to match up to the site content words. This means that Google has a clear understanding of the focus of your website.

Additional Benefits of the Sitemaps Program

Google has even started notifying Sitemaps-participating Webmasters if they are breaking any of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This can be very valuable information if your site suddenly becomes de-listed on Google and you don’t know why.

Only Sitemaps participants can get this information, and it is only provided at Google’s discretion. In fact, Google will NOT notify you if you are creating worthless websites that offer no original content, or if you are creating thousands of doorway pages that are redirecting to other web sites. Google doesn’t want to give the sp@ammers any clues as to how to improve their techniques.

How Do You Get Started with Google Site Maps?

The first thing you must do is obtain a Google Account. If you already have a Gmail, Adsense, or Adwords account, then you are all set. If not, you can register an account by visiting the Google Accounts page (https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount).

Building your sitemap file is pretty easy to do if you are familiar with XML, and if you aren’t you can always use a third-party tool such as the ones that are listed on Google’s website (http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html). Google also has a “Sitemap Generator” that you can download and install on your server, but unless you are fairly adept at managing Python scripts, you should probably stick to the third-party tools.

At any rate, once you have your Google Account and your Sitemap file built, the rest is very easy. All you have to do is:

1. Log into your account (http://google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview)

2. Type your website’s URL into the “Add Site” box and click on “OK”

3. Click on the Manage Sites link for the website you are adding, and add your sitemap file to your account.

Google Sitemaps – An Excellent SEO Tool

Google Sitemaps help Googlebot quickly find new content on your website. They allow you to tell Google what’s important, what’s new, and what changes often. The tools provided to webmasters through the program can play a vital role in helping you understand how the search engines (especially Google) view your website.

Using this information you can dramatically improve the position of your website and quickly clear up any issues Google finds. You can also use the tools provided by Google to gauge the effectiveness of your off-site optimization efforts so you can better focus your time and energy on activities that bring you the most success.

Matthew Coers is an Internet marketing expert. His website, ProfitChoice.com contains online courses designed to teach entrepreneurs how to build a website and make money online. Download his FREE Internet Marketing report, 7 Days to Website Success.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Matthew_Coers

Google explains everything and lists Sitemaps resources at:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html

To use Google sitemaps, you must first sign up for a Google Account. If you already use Google Adwords, Analytics, Gmail or other Google provided tools, you can use your existing account to submit a Google sitemap for your site. Get an account at the following URL if you don’t already use Google services:

https://www.google.com/accounts/

NON-PROGRAMMER SMALL BUSINESS WEBMASTERS WANT SIMPLICITY

Many webmasters struggle to understand even the simplest HTML and meta tags and after visiting the Sitemaps program page when it was first announced in the summer of 2005, those small business site owners went away sadly shaking their heads and mumbling. They complained, “I can’t even add PERL scripts to my own CGI bin and properly set permissions on page files – how am I going to install and debug a Python script on my server, run cron jobs and generate XML files?”

Apparently Google heard all that grumbling and came back with the newly released “Webmaster Central” to answer the concerns of excess complexity. They no longer require you to be a geek to get all your pages into their index. They’ve created tools to make the job of submitting all of your pages for inclusion in their index very much easier to handle.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

The first listed “Site Status” tool lets you check indexing of your sites. If you enter an address into that search box and press the “Next” button, they’ll return a page with a button labeled “Take me to Google Sitemaps” and encouraging use of the sitemaps tools, regardless of whether you’ve already submitted that sitemap or not. They’ll list some minor details about the site entered such as:

Pages from your site are included in Google’s index.
Some of these pages are indexed without a title or description.
Googlebot last successfully accessed your home page on Aug 18, 2006

They list “Potential indexing problems” and then state:

More details about your site may be available

By using Google Sitemaps, you can learn more details available only to site owners, such as:

o errors Googlebot encountered while crawling your site

o top search queries that return your site

GOOGLE SITEMAPS DIFFERENT FROM HTML SITEMAPS

Let’s back up for a moment though. Webmasters have been told for ten years now to build a sitemap into their web site that lists all of their pages (if it is a small web site with under a hundred pages) or at least listing major sections of their site (if they have thousands or tens of thousands of pages.) So what is the difference here?

Google sitemaps are actually XML documents (not public html pages) that hold much more information about your web pages to help Google determine several things. They list the “priority” or importance, “last modified” dates, and “change frequency” of each page. But the creation of those documents had required webmasters to install that Python script on their server. Available at:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=137793&package_id=153422

Or webmasters had to use third party software to generate the required XML file. Google recommends a brief list of sources for third party software to help them programmatically create the XML sitemaps:

http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html

I’ve personally tried several of those third party tools and found two of the web-based sitemap generators lacking, one of the downloaded software tools crashed my computer (and created havoc for me), so what is a small business owner without programming skills to do?

Those business owners who are non-programmer types and want to use Google Sitemaps complained that Google was favoring geeks over business owners. They wanted a simple way to submit all of their pages to Google without running cron jobs on their server and debugging Python scripts.

PLAIN TEXT SITEMAPS FILES NOW ACCEPTED

Google heard our grumbling and now allows simple lists of URL’s in a plain text document. All you have to do is create that list of page files, save it as sitemap.txt and upload it to your server. Then you log in to your Google Webmaster Central (AKA Sitemaps) account and tell them the URL of your sitemap text document.

Before you submit your first sitemap URL on a domain, Google requires you to put a “site verification” meta tag on your site home page and click a “Verify” button to prove you own the site. Anyone with a Google account and access to your server can do this. You can add or remove any authorization tags placed by anyone with access to your server who is no longer authorized to see this data.

WEBMASTER CENTRAL TOOLS FOR SITE OWNERS

In the “Diagnostic” tab, there is a tool that will validate your robots.txt file, tells you which pages are restricted by that file and lists problem URL’s and reasons for the problems. It also lets you make changes in a copy of your robots.txt file locally, which shows immediately how changes would affect the next crawl by all Google bots, including the Adsense and PPC landing page quality crawlers! They warn on that page that local changes don’t affect your own robots.txt file and remind you to make the changes to the file on your server.

Another useful “Diagnostic” tool lets you set your preference for canonical URL’s to include www or non-www versions of your site. (This last item shows how seriously the Google team takes this canonical issue.)

What other tools are provided in Webmaster Central?

Under the “Statistics” tab in Webmaster Central is are “Query stats, Crawl stats, Page analysis” links with more data on your pages. The Query statistics show your top 20 search queries that searchers have used to find your web site and your top 20 click through queries. Those data tables provide some interesting and sometimes unexpected detail about how visitors find your site and allow you to further optimize and funnel those visitors. The “Crawl Stats” promises to show PageRank and distribution of PageRank throughout your site and in comparison to other sites.

The “Sitemaps” tab simply lists your submitted sitemaps for all your sites and shows the dates “Submitted, Last Downloaded, and Sitemap Status.” The status tells you if there are errors, and what they were (not allowed, external site links, 404 error page not found, etc.) I’ve just submitted a new sitemap on a just reserved, created and newly posted site this week and will report back on how long it took for index inclusion on that site to record the effect of early sitemap submissions.

LIFTING YOUR SKIRT FOR GOOGLE

Finally, there is a “Tools” link in the upper right corner of the “Sitemaps” page which allows you to “Download Data for all sites”, “Report Spam in Our Index” and a “Reinclusion Request” link to use if you’ve been banned for questionable techniques. Clearly, since you are doing all of this from within a Google account, you are openly providing Google with your information and making all spam reporting and reinclusion requests under your name from within a Google account. This suggests that you trust Google with all information they hold on your sites and any complaint made about search engine spam.

Currently there are ratings tools from within the Webmaster Central site to let you tell Google if you like the tools with a smily face, a neutral face and a frowny face. This may not last as the program comes out of beta, but lets you tell them what is useful and what isn’t.

Still need some help? Try joining, reading, searching and posting to Sitemaps and Webmaster Central Google Groups. Posts from webmasters get back responses from knowledgeable members. Watch for the little green “G” logo for Sitemaps team members for particularly definitive and useful recommendations.

http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help
http://groups.google.com/group/google-sitemaps

Want ongoing official Google blog posts about Webmaster Central?

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/

If you’ve had trouble getting all your pages indexed and want to use those informative and useful webmaster tools and reports – give Webmaster Central a try.

Mike Banks Valentine operates SEOptimism, Offering SEO training of in-house content managers
http://seoptimism.com/SEO_Staff_Training.htm as well as contract SEO for advertising agencies, web development companies and marketing firms. http://seoptimism.com/Ad_Agency_SEO_Contracting.htm

Content aggregation, article and press release optimization & distribution for linking campaigns.
http://seoptimism.com/Linking_SEO.htm

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mike_Valentine

In theory, it is simple – if you have something interesting to someone else, if you build a website with the honest to goodness goal to provide something useful for someone else, that someone else will find you. That is also how the creators of Google describe their main goal, to more or less have a great repository of information, and help people of our planet find useful stuff.

In practice, it is not that simple. It is not that simple because there are thousands, possibly even millions of sites like yours, because you might be running a very honest online business, selling some very useful product, but do not have unheard of, exceptionally grand ‘content’. If your site is listed on page 265 of a search results set, be sure you will never get any visitors that way.

Unlike Yahoo and others, who rely on human involvement, Google does everything through automation. Websites are indexed (or crawled, or spidered – all terms refer to the same process) by their indexing software called Googlebot. Googlebot looks at websites daily, and rules programmed into the software decide which of your pages make it into the main Google index and which don’t. After your site was indexed, whether it was submitted for indexing by a human or the robot just stumbled upon it, your pages are ranked, so Google knows on which page of a search to put your site on, and on what search phrases should your site even be part of the result search.

The Googlebot is very smart and works really well. Keep in mind however, that is just a piece of software, a very sophisticated one, but it’s just a computer program. Consequently, it has a set of algorithms (rules) it uses to index web site content (information), a set of capabilities (as I said before, Googlebot is really intelligent) and a set of limitations. As such, there is an impressive number of ways in which one can trip up the Googlebot and make it impossible for it to index your content. Alternately, the Googlebot can index your site well, and then people will find it when searching for words it contains.

This article will try to teach you all the basics necessary to achieve consistency and persistency in Google, starting with the very basic step: getting indexed by Googlebot, Google’s indexing robot.

1. Read Google’s own Webmaster Guidelines

The people behind Google seem to have two main things down to a science: One, most of their algorithms (rules) are so secret, that all us non-Google employees do is speculate. Two, their guidelines are very simple, direct and precise. Following their guidelines will never hurt your site’s ranking. Disregarding their guidelines can and probably will hurt you in the long run. So go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html and read what Google has to say about itself.

2. Have text links.

Make every single page on your site accessible via a text-based link, as opposed to Javascript, Flash, DHTML (Dynamic HTML), etc. Googlebot’s native language is text.
Google says: “Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.”

This is probably the number one key to your site’s existence in Google. Googlebot is actually a robotic, browser-like software, based on the venerable Lynx browser. The reasoning behind this approach is that the creators are trying to get as close as possible to emulating human browsing, making sure your website is actually human friendly. Consequently, by downloading Lynx on your computer and looking at your site through Lynx (http://lynx.isc.org), you will see more or less exactly the information Googlebot can read and index and the links Googlebot can follow. You will also see HTML errors on your pages and places where a robot would be stuck and could not reach the rest of your site.

I know it is very unfair to those of us who understand and love the potential of websites built completely in Flash, or other engines. However, until the nice folks who run Google figure out a good way to crawl inside a Flash file and extract the appropriate information, we are stuck with standard HTML.

This is not to say that you cannot make your site really pretty and fill it with Java Script and Flash eye candy. But you must have regular text and standard text links. Usually you can achieve the desired effect by having extra navigation menus based on standard text links.

3. Avoid frames.

Avoid frames at all cost. If you must use them (for example to make someone else’s page look like it’s part of your site), do not use them on your front page.

Frames are like the plague, they sneak up on you. It is incredibly easy to lose Googlebot’s tracks inside a badly formatted frameset. You might hear that some of the robots, including Google’s Googlebot and Yahoo’s Slurp are quickly gaining capabilities to go inside frames properly. My philosophy is, until a feature becomes ubiquitous, if you’re uncertain, leave it in the closet.

4. Keep the number of links on a given page less than 100.

This comes straight from Google’s Webmaster Guidelines: “Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).”

This looks more like a suggestion and I am not 100% sure if you get penalized in any way or if Googlebot just stops reading your links after 100. I can however tell you from personal experience that I tried a page with 700 links and it seemed fine. Then one day I tried to view the page from my Blackberry PDA and I got this strange error message saying my page is illegally formatted. After I split the page into several ones with 80 links each, the pages worked on the PDA also.

Who cares about the Blackberry? Well, if you’re reading this and your goal is to get visitors, then your main concern should be not to alienate anyone. Remember, today more than ever, people use different devices and different software to access the web. Every visitor is a potential customer. Every employee at a major US lawfirm and many other corporate people use a Blackberry.

Lastly, why would you need that many links on one page anyway? Let’s say, for example, that you specialize in promotional products – corporate branded gifts, such as pens, caps, mints and other products (called sometimes ‘premiums’) imprinted with one’s logo. Your name is John Doe, and you decided to name your company JDPromos (not very imaginative, but will do for our examples). You would want to have every item in your catalog as a text link, so every item gets indexed as a link and as a keyword. Also, those who run forums, ezines, blogs, might want to have standard links to their articles, as the software they use might create dynamic links, invisible to certain robots.

5. Give every page a meaningful title.

Give every single page on the site a complete and meaningful title. This is also directly from Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. See Rule #1.

Incidentally, for those who are fascinated by the debates on the death of the Meta Tags, the
<title></title>
tag is not a Meta Tag, but a required element for every page.

The “title” tag is supported by every web creation tool out there, and goes in the header of a web page (between the “head” and the “/head” tags).

Google offers the ‘allintitle’ syntax, which lets users search only text that appears in a page title. A lot of people who integrate a Google bar into their websites allow users to get results only by title. There are over 29 million results returned for Untitled Document.

Most of us – myself included – copy and paste template pages, out of the convenience of not having to recreate all design elements from scratch. If you do so, do not forget to change the title.

Make sure your title is not just a list of keywords and that it is related to the actual content of the page. Google can and will check that, before deciding on your page’s ‘relevance’.

6. Do not place important text inside images.

Google says: “Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.”

It is very tempting to create images with text inside them, for the very simple reason that as designers, we are not limited to the very few font (type) options that basic HTML allows. Also, different browsers tend to display things differently nowadays, so it is much easier to create a text image, which will be shown consistently and not worry about styles, operating systems, etc.

7. Use descriptive “ALT” tags.

The “ALT” tag is used as a text alternative (hence the name) for images and image links and was designed so that text browsers (such as Lynx) do not just display a generic ‘Image’ for every picture link you might have. If all your links say ‘Image’, how would a potential visitor know what they are?

Make sure that the text description is meaningful and accurate. Take our promotional items company as an example. Let’s say they have a picture of a tradeshow display, as an example of a service they provide outside the ordinary imprinted mint boxes, calculators and keychains. If the “ALT” tag only says “display”, that is what Googlebot will see and index. If the tag says something like “example of a tradeshow display design”, that is certainly more useful and more Googlebot friendly.

Please note that although the “ALT” tag does count and Google seems to put a high price on this tag, it ranks lower than plain text.

8. Use meaningful descriptions for links

With the risk of sounding like a scratched CD, I’ll have to say this again: Whether you use picture links or text links, please use meaningful text inside your tags so that Googlebot can associate that text with that href link.

In other words, let’s pretend again that we are designing that website for that imaginary promotional items company we called JDPromos. If you intend to put a link to a set of sample coffee mugs promos, say something like “link to JDPromos samples of branded coffee mugs”, not just “coffee mugs”, or even worse, “click here for pictures”. Never use link text like “read more” or “go here” or “download it”, “click here”, “don’t click here”, you get the picture – I hope.

Don’t try to fool the Googlebot with hidden links or duplicate content or irrelevant pages of words like “sex” and “hot girls.” The Googlebot doesn’t like being played and you will be penalized, one way or another, in the long run.

9. Use a “description” tag for every page

Include a

<meta name=”description” content=”[insert your site's description here]“>

tag in your page header to summarize your site. Use a meaningful one or two sentence description, do not keyword spam.

Even better, include descriptive text on the site’s front page where users can actually read it. This text will appear as the description for your site in Google results.

Place more important content higher in the page than less important content in a page, Google does categorize text on a page based on it’s position, text at the bottom of a page is considered less important, or ‘relevant’, to use one of Google’s own terms.

10. Use short query strings

Use URLs with query strings sparingly, if at all possible. Query strings are also called dynamic pages. You can usually recognize dynamic pages by the presence of the “?” character. Keep in mind that the shorter the list of query string parameters, the better. Be aware that not every search engine robot can crawl dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.

11. Never use the “&id=” parameter

If you must use query strings, or dynamic pages, never use the “&id=” parameter as part of the string.

I know this might sound ridiculous, as it might be hard or impossible for you not to use the “&id=” parameter, but if you are a programmer and you can change the variable’s name, replace “id” with something else. Otherwise, Googlebot will just skip that page.

Google says: “Don’t use “&id=” as a parameter in your URLs, as we don’t include these pages in our index.”

12. Use robots.txt

Use robots.txt to show the Googlebot around your site. This ancient and very standard mechanism for directing well-behaved robots like the Googlebot will allow you to specify places where the robot is not welcome, whether for privacy reasons, or for reasons of avoiding Google penalties. You might want to keep the robot away from your cgi-bin directory and other places you maybe don’t want available to the entire searching population of the globe. Remember this is a guideline, not a barrier, robots that are not programmed to comply, will disregard. Bottom line, use the robots.txt to guide Googlebot, but not to enforce strict security.

Google says: “Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled.”

13. Make a sitemap

A site map is just a page on your website where you guide your users through the structure of your site. The most basic form of sitemap is a page that lists all of your pages, with a brief description and a link – all text, of course. When you make the sitemap, follow all the rules above and don’t forget that the purpose of the sitemap is to guide your human visitor.

Google says: “Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.”

14. Use the Google Sitemaps project

At the time of this writing, the fastest, best and most accurate way to make sure your site is properly crawled and indexed by Googlebot is to participate in the Google Sitemaps project.

In a nutshell, you make a sitemap as an XML page and submit it directly to Google. Google then sends Googlebot to index your site. Besides the speedy free submission, you also get a good amount of statistics and the opportunity to fix potential errors in your site.

Please note that the XML sitemap needed for the Google Sitemap project is intended specifically for Googlebot, and is different from the sitemap described in the previous Rule, which is intended solely for human users.

Also, do not be afraid of XML, Google’s sitemap is a very simple text file and they give you all the necessary information and directions at: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps

Good luck!

—
Andrei co-owns Bsleek – a company that specializes in web design, hosting, promotional items, printing, tradeshow displays, logos, CD presentations, SEO and more. Andrei has amassed an extensive technical knowledge and experience through his career as the CIO for a major travel management company and through his past careers in military research, data acquisition and airspace engineering. He also consults for Trinity Investigations, a New York based PI firm.

—
Bsleek – Redefining cheap web hosting [http://www.bsleek.com/hosting/]

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Andrei_Smith

But if you knew what I do, you’d realize that there are tools provided by the search engine that help you learn more about your traffic, and may even help drive visitors to your site.

Here are five ways that Google provides free traffic assistance.

#1 – Google will Help Your Pages Get Discovered with Google Sitemaps
[https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login]

Google Sitemaps is a program that gives you the opportunity to present your site’s pages to Google in XML or text. Google will then come by and spider the pages, getting you indexed faster.

Take note that this doesn’t necessarily mean that your pages will be listed for your favorite keywords, only that discovery will take place a lot faster than with manual submission. Google Sitemaps will also give you some basic site stats if you verify your site, such as the top keywords for discovery, errors it found when crawling, and the types of documents at your site.

If you find compiling your sitemap for Google in the correct format difficult, try the SOFTplus GSiteCrawler Google Sitemap generator. It’s my favorite Sitemap generator, free and easy to use.

#2 – Google Will Talk To You and Your Webmaster In His or Her Native Tongue or Plain English with the Webmaster Section
http://www.google.com/webmasters/

The Google Information Page for Webmasters should be your first stop when you want to know more about anything that has to do with your site and its relationship to Google and any of its many flavors of search such as Froogle. Particularly for new site owners or operators, checking this page first has saved many from needless anxiety.

Most of the basic information is in straightforward language, with links to details for geeks like me.

#3 – Google will Tell You What It Knows with Web Page Information

If you type info:yoursite.com into Google, Google will tell show you a page that has your link at the top of the page, with a short description, and the following phrase “Google can show you the following information for this URL”.

This special page compiles several queries about your site including pages that contain your URL (all the pages Google knows of that are linked to you).

#4 – Google will Help You Analyze Your Traffic with Google Analytics
http://www.google.com/analytics/

After a recent purchase of Urchin Stats, a free online version has been made available, and re-branded as Google Analytics. This cookie-based invisible visitor tracker can give you information that go a bit beyond standard stats such as bounce rates, visitor loyalty, keyword discovery results for a single day, click paths through your site, and page views per visit.

With the ability to analyze your traffic, you can help learn where the holes in your site are, and how to keep them on your site for longer periods of time, as well as better ways to steer a visit towards a specific action, such as a subscription. Results come in flavors for the executive and the search marketer alike.

There’s currently a waiting list to use Google Analytics due to popular demand.

#5 – Google Will Advise On Getting the Most from Your Traffic with Conversion University
[http://www.google.com/analytics/conversionuniversity.html]

Google Analytics also has two content sections that are available to all, called Conversion University. While the articles are decidedly slanted towards AdWords users, a prudent read yields many clues that can be applied to preparing for visitors who arrive through organic search discovery. One reference area is called “Driving Traffic”, the other “Converting Visitors.”

At the end of the day, the process by which your site gets ranked in Google search engine results is a computation of a complex algorithm, which means Google – the search engine – really isn’t capable of being your best friend or your worst enemy.

Meanwhile, Google – the company – also provides access to resources that will help give your site a fighting chance.

Is it possible to build a site that withstands the search engine updates? Join the speculation at http://www.freetraffictip.com/algorithm-proof.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tinu_Abayomi-Paul

Google has recently implemented a program where any webmaster
can create a Sitemap of their Site and submit it for indexing
by Google. It is a quick and easy way for you to keep your
site constantly indexed and updated in Google.

The program is appropriately called Google Sitemaps.

In order for you to best use Sitemaps, you must have an XML generated
file on your site that will transmit or send any updates, changes, and
data to Google. XML (Extensible Markup Language)is everywhere these days,
you have probably seen the orange XML logo on many web sites and its
often associated with Blogging because Blogs use XML/RSS feeds to
syndicate their content.

Today RSS is known mostly as ‘Really Simple Syndication’ but its original
acronym stood for ‘Rich Site Summary’. XML is only simple code like HTML
and it is used to syndicate your content to all interested parties.

And the interested party in this case is Google. By creating
Sitemaps Google is really asking webmasters to take charge of
the indexing and updating of their sites. Basically, doing
the Googlebot’s job!

This is a ‘Good’ thing! With the steady influx of new web sites
growing rapidly, indexing all this material will become a challenge,
even with the resources of Google. With Sitemaps, websmasters can
now take charge and make sure their site is crawled and indexed.

Please note, indexing your site with Sitemaps WON’T improve
your rankings in Google. You will still be competing with the other
sites in Google for top positions. But with Sitemaps you can make
sure all your pages are crawled and indexed quickly by Google.

There are some other big advantages of using Google’s Sitemaps
– mainly you have control over a few key variables, attributes or tags.
To explain this as simply as possible, your XML powered sitemap
file will have this simple code for each page of your site:

http://www.yoursite.com/

1.0

2005-07-03T16:18:09+00:00

daily

Along with ‘urlset’ tags at the beginning and end of your code,
and an XML version indication – that’s basically your XML file!
File size will depend on the number of webpages you have.

Taking a closer look at this XML file:

location http://www.yoursite.com — name of your webpage

priority you set the priority you want Google to place on that page
in your site. You can prioritize your pages: 0.0 being the least,
1.0 being the highest, 0.5 is in the middle. This is ONLY relative to
your site. It will not affect your rankings. Why is this important?
You have certain pages on your site that are more important than
others, (home page, high profit page, opt-in page, etc.) by placing high
priority on these pages, you will increase their importance in Google.

last modified when you last modified that page, this timestamp allows
crawlers to avoid recrawling pages that haven’t changed.

change frequency you can tell Google how often you change that
particular page. Never, weekly, daily, hourly, and so on — if you
frequently update your page this could be extremely important.

Why do I need a XML Generator?

In order for this XML sitemap file on your site to be constantly
updated, you need a Generator that will spider your site, list
all the urls and automatically feed them to Google. Thus constantly
updating your site in Google’s massive index or database.
Keep in mind, Google also gives you the option of submitting
a simple text file with all your URLs.

Now there is already a flood of these generators popping up! Different
ways of generating your XML powered sitemap file. More are probably appearing
as you read this. But lets look at Three ways to generate your XML file.

Difficult Google’s Python Generator

That’s a relative term, if you know your server like the back of your
hand and installing scripts doesn’t scare the bejesus out of you,
you’re probably smiling at the word difficult. Google supplies a link to a
generator which you can download and set up on your server. It will cough
up your sitemap XML file and automatically feed it to Google.
Google XML Generator [https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/sitemap-generator.html]

In order for this Generator to work, Python version 2.2 must be installed
on your web server, many servers don’t have this. If you know what you’re
doing, this will probably be a good choice.

You don’t need a Google Account to use Sitemaps but it’s encouraged
because you can track your sitemap’s progress and view diagnostic
information. If you already have another Google Account gmail,
Google Alerts, etc. just use that one to sign in and follow directions
from there.

To submit your Sitemap using an HTTP request, issue your request
to the following URL:

[http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url]

Hard A PHP Code Generator

This is a php generator that you can place on your server. This
generator will spider your site, and produce your XML sitemap file. Download
the phpSitemapNG and upload it your server. Run the generator to get
your XML sitemap file and send it to Google.
PHP Generator

Again, this is only hard to do if you don’t know your way around PHP
files or scripts.

Easy Free Online Generator

These Generators are popping up everywhere, and Google now keeps a list of
these ‘third party suppliers’ of generators on their site. Find them here:
Google’s List of Third Party Generators

One of the easiest to use is www.xml-sitemaps.com, and you can
index up to 500 pages with this online Generator very quickly and it will
give you the sitemap XML file Google needs to index your site.

It will go into your site, spider it and index all your pages into an
XML sitemap of your site. You can download this file, Compressed or Non-
compressed and make minor changes such as setting the priority,
changing frequency, etc.

Then upload this file to your site as sitemap.xml to the root directory
of your server i.e. where you have your homepage. Then notify Google
Sitemaps of your XML file and you’re in business.

Of course, the only drawback, if you constantly add pages to your site
you will need to also add these pages to your XML sitemap file.
This won’t be much of a problem unless you’re daily adding pages
to your site — then you will need something like the PHP or Python
generator to do all this for you automatically.

Google is still the major search engine on the web so getting your
pages indexed and updated quickly is the major reason to use Google
Sitemaps. If you want your site to remain competitive it’s probably
the wisest route to take.

To learn more about the different Services and Programs offered

by Google click here: Google Adsense & Google Adwords

This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Titus_Hoskins

Telling search engines about new pages or new websites use to be what the submission process was all about. But major search engines stopped using that process a long time ago.

Google has for a long time depended on external links from pages they already know about in order to find new websites.

For webmasters and website owners Google Sitemaps is the most important development since RSS or Blog and Ping, to hit the Internet.

Using RSS and Blog and Ping enabled webmasters to alert the search engines to new additions to their web pages even though that was not the primary purpose of these systems.

If you’ve ever waited weeks or months to get your web pages found and indexed you’ll know how excited we webmasters get when someone discovers a new way to get your web pages found quicker.

Well that new way has just arrived in Google Sitemaps and it’s a whole lot simpler than setting up an RSS feed or Blog and Ping. If you haven’t heard of Blog and Ping it’s a means by which it’s possible to alert the search engines to crawl your new website content within a matter of hours.

If you’re a webmaster or website owner Google Sitemaps is something you
Can’t afford to ignore, even if you’re also using RSS and/or Blog and Ping

The reason you should start using Google Sitemaps is that it’s designed solely to alert and direct Google Search Engine crawlers to your web pages. RSS and Blog and Ping are indirect methods to alert search engines, but it’s not there primary purpose.

It works now, but like most things it’s becoming abused. Search Engines will find ways to combat the abuse as they’ve done with every other form of abuse that’s gone before.

Abusing the search engines is a short term not a long term strategy and in some cases certain forms of abuse will get you banned from a search engines index.

You may also be thinking, don’t we already have web page meta tags that tell a search engine when to revisit a page. That’s true, but the search engine spider still has to find the new page first, before it can read the meta tag. Besides that meta tags are out of favour with many search engines especially Google, because of abuse.

If talk of search engine spiders leaves you confused, they’re nothing more than software programs that electronically scour the Internet visiting web sites looking for changes and new pages.

How often the search engine spider alias robot, visits your website depends on how often your site content is updated, or you alert them to a change. Otherwise for a search engine like Google they may only visit a website once a month.

As the internet gets bigger every second of every day, the problem for search engines and webmasters is becoming evidently greater. For the search engines it’s taking their search spiders longer to crawl the web for new sites or updates to existing ones.

For the webmaster it’s taking longer and becoming more difficult to get web pages found and indexed by the search engines

If you can’t get web pages found and indexed by search engines, your pages will never be found in a search and you’ll get no visitors from search engines to those pages.

The answer to this problem at least for Google is Google Sitemaps

Whilst still only in a beta phase while Google refines the process, it’s fully expected that this system, or one very similar, is here to stay.

Google Sitemaps is clearly a win-win situation

Google wins because it reduces the huge waste of their resources to crawl web sites that have not changed. Webmasters win because they alert Google through Google Sitemaps what changes or new content has been added to a website and direct Google’s crawlers to the exact pages.

Google Sitemaps has the potential to speed up the process of discovery and addition of pages to Google’s index for any webmaster that uses Google Sitemaps.

Conventional sitemaps have been used by webmasters for quite some time to allow the easier crawling of their websites by the search engine spiders. This type of sitemap is a directory of all pages on the website that the webmaster wants the search engines or visitors to find.

Without sitemaps a webmaster runs the risk of webpage’s being difficult to find by the search engine crawlers, or never being found at all.

Do I need Google Sitemaps if I already have sitemaps on my websites?

Google Sitemaps are different to conventional sitemaps because they’re only seen by the Search Engine Spiders and not human visitors. Google Sitemaps also contain information that’s only of value to the search engine in a format they understand.

Creating Google Sitemaps in 5 steps

1. Create Google Sitemaps in a supported format ( see end of article )

2. Upload Google Sitemaps to your Web Hosting space

3. Register for a free Google Account if you don’t already have one

4. Login to your Google Sitemaps Account and submit the location of your sitemaps

5. Update your Sitemaps when your site changes and Resubmit it to Google

From your Google Sitemaps account you can also see when your sitemap was last updated and when Google downloaded it for processing. It will also tell you if there were any problems found with your sitemaps.

Google Sitemaps can be used with commercial or non-commercial websites, those with a single webpage, through to sites with millions of constantly updated pages. However a single Google Sitemaps file is limited to 50,000 web pages. For websites with more pages, another Google Sitemaps file must be created for each block of 50,000 pages.

If you want Google to crawl more of your pages and alert them when content on your site changes, you should be using Google Sitemaps. The other added benefit is it’s free.

If you’re expecting this special alert process with Google Sitemaps to improve your Page Rank, change the way Google ranks your web pages, or in any way guarantee inclusion of your web pages, Google has made it clear it will make no difference.

Google Sitemaps web pages are still subject to the same rules as non Google Sitemaps pages.

If your site has dynamic content or pages that aren’t easily discovered by following links, Google Sitemaps will allow spiders to know what URLs are available and how often page content changes.

Google has said that Google Sitemaps is not a replacement for the normal crawling of web pages and websites as that will continue in the conventional way. Google Sitemaps does however allow the search engine to do a better job of crawling your site.

The Google Sitemap Protocol is an XML file containing a list of the URLs on a site. It also tells the search engine when each page was last updated, how often each page changes and how important each page is in relation to other web pages in the site.

Google Sitemaps 7 Benefits You Can’t Ignore

1. Alert Google to Changes and Additions to your Website Anytime You Want

2. Your Website is crawled more Efficiently and Effectively

3. Web Pages are Categorized and Prioritized exactly How You Want

4. Speed up the process of New Website and New Web Page Discovery

5. No Waiting and Guessing to see when Spiders crawl your web pages

6. Google Sitemaps is likely to set the standard for Webpage Submission and Update Notification which will extend the benefits to other Search Engines

7. The Google Sitemaps service is Free

Exactly how to create a Google Sitemaps file to upload to your website is in the continuing part of this article in Google Sitemaps.

Tony Simpson is a Web Designer and Search Engine Optimizer who brings a touch of reality to building a Web Business. It’s a No-Hype, No B.S approach from his own 5 year experience. He provides advice, product reviews and products at Web Page Add Ons to Make Automation of Your Web Site Work for You.

The continuing part of this article about creating Google Sitemaps is at Google Sitemaps

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tony_Simpson

* Google is a innovative company always coming up with new ideas to keep one step ahead of the competition.
* Search Engines are the most important way that most webses generate new traffic.
* Google is the most important of the Search Engines.

One of Googles latest implementations is a method of allowing web-designers and website owners to create specially formatted sitemap documents that inform and direct the Google robots. These sitemaps are a quick and easy way to keep your site constantly indexed and updated within the Google database and to ensure that all of your sites pages are crawled by the Google search engine robot. The program is called ‘Google Sitemaps’ and this is what Google themselves have to say about it:

Google Sitemaps is an experiment in web crawling. Using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and improve the time to inclusion in our index. By placing a Sitemap-formatted file on your webserver, you enable our crawlers to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly. Google Sitemaps is intended for all web site owners, from those with a single web page to companies with millions of ever-changing pages. If any of the following are true, then you may be especially interested in Google Sitemaps:

• You want Google to crawl more of your web pages.

• You want to be able to tell Google when content on your site changes.

What is a Google Sitemap?

The Sitemap protocol requires the sitemap to be present on your web-server in the form of an XML document. XML is simple code like HTML and it is used to syndicate your content to all interested parties. You may have seen it in use for syndicating weblog entries via RSS to a news-reader. In the case of Google Sitemaps, the XML document is syndicated to Google and their software uses it to ensure that the pages of your website are crawled and indexed.

Before the introduction of Google Sitemaps, website-owners had to rely on the Google robot to find all of a websites links in order to make sure that all the pages were indexed. The introduction of Google Sitemaps now gives website owners some control over this process. In additoin, the XML format of the sitemap document also gives you control over several key variables.

If we examine a very simple chunk of code from a basic Google sitemap XML document we can see the variables we now have control over.

<url> <loc>URL HERE</loc> <priority>1.0</priority> <lastmod>2005-07-06T18:00:00+00:00</lastmod> <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> </url>

This part of code describes one page of a website, so a typical Google Sitemap document would contain similar chunks of code for every page contained within the website. As you can see each web page has 4 variables:

LOCATION – Simply the URL of the web page.

PRIORITY – A number from 0.0 to 1.0 allowing you to set the priority of a particular page within your website. This number is a relative setting and relates only to those pages within your site. It allows you to instruct Google to pay more attention to particular key pages within your website.

LAST MODIFIED – This tells Google when your web pages were last modified so preventing the robot from having to index pages that haven’t changed since its last visit.

CHANGE FREQUENCY – This allows you to tell Google how often the content of a page is likely to change. You can set it to never, yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, hourly and always.

How do I create a Google Sitemap?

There are a number of ways to create a Google Sitemap document for your website.

The simplest but least controllable way is to use an online XML generator that will spider the pages in your website, and automatically create the XML file for you. With most you then have to upload the file to your web-server and inform Google of its presence. There are plenty of these scripts popping up and many of them are completely free. Select this link for a

The main disadvantage to using these online generators is that they need to be recreated each time you add new pages to your website. This won’t be a problem for many website owners who rarely add new pages, but for those who are constantly adding new pages another approach may be better.

If you would like a little more control over the various parameters stored within your Google Sitemap XML document then a script that you configure and then upload to your web-server may be the answer for you. These are written in various scripting languages such as PHP or Perl and give you more control over your Google Sitemap. They do require some knowledge of scripting and installation to get them working which is beyond the scope of this article. Many however can be set up to run at regular intervals and not only spider your complete site and automatically generate your XML Google Sitemaps document but also upload it to the relevant place on your web-server and ping Google to tell them that the sitemap exists.

Finally you could use Googles own Sitemap generator which is a Python script and takes a little more knowledge to install and configure on your web-server. It also requires that Python 2.2 is installed on the server.

Note: These automatic Sitemap generators work by following the internal links within your website, any orphaned pages that are not linked to will not be included in your sitemap.

How do I submit my Sitemap to Google?

Whichever method you use to generate your Google Sitemaps document, you then need to submit it to Google. Most of the online generators and scripts will either do this for you or give you an option to do it once your XML document has been uploaded.

First, you should create a Google Sitemaps Account (which requires you to have a Google Account). This account enables Google to provide you with useful status and statistical information. The My Sitemaps page lets you know if there are problems with your Sitemap or with any of the URLs listed in it. Your Google Sitemaps account will also allow you to re-submit your Sitemaps document when you make changes to it.

Once your Sitemaps account is set up simply use the online forms to inform Google of the location of your new Sitemaps document and your site will soon be indexed.

Summary

Google Sitemaps give website owners the opportunity to inform Google about all the pages of their website. It should ensure that no pages are missed and also allows a certain degree of control over the relative importance of individual pages. Simply generating a Google Sitemaps document won’t necessarily give you higher rankings within the search engines as you will still be competing with other websites for those top spots. Both on page Search Engine Optimisation and off-page promotion will still be essential. However, sitemaps make sure all your pages are crawled and indexed quickly by Google, and may therefore give you a competitive advantage over those websites that don’t have a Google Sitemap.

Alan Cole runs http://www.pixelwave.co.uk, a one-person web design studio. His aim is to provide cost effective website design production and maintenance by offering professional web solutions that stand out from the crowd. Increasingly his work involves website promotion and Search Engine Optimisation as well as training courses on all aspects of web design and promotion.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Alan_Cole

For better or worst, Google has permeated into almost every aspect
of our everyday life. Being Googled is now a common expression and
an act carried out by millions of users around the world each day.
New Google products and services are coming on stream at a frightening
pace, further increasing Google’s impact on our lives.

Despite this dominating presence, many people still don’t realize
Google offers some excellent free marketing tools for marketers
and webmasters. Marketing tools which can prove extremely valuable
to any webmaster or marketer trying to promote their sites or
products online. Useful tools that will make your promotions
easier and much more profitable.

Don’t be fooled by the ‘free’ label, these marketing tools
might be free but there are also valuable. One even wonders
why Google would be giving away these tools and services for
free? It probably makes good business sense in the long
run, by providing these free tools Google is fostering a
lot of company good-will and building up the Google brand
name in the process. Good PR is good business.

Every marketer and webmaster should be taking advantage of
Google’s good-will and snapping up these professionally run
services and marketing tools. Here’s a quick run-down of
the 10 most valuable free Google Internet marketing tools:

1. Google Analytics

Perhaps the premier marketing tool offered by Google.
It will prove helpful to both the marketer and the webmaster.
Google Analytics gives you a daily snapshot of your web site. Google
Analytics analyzes your traffic, where it comes from and what it does
once it enters your site. You can monitor up to three sites
for free.

Google Analytics is extremely valuable in analyzing your
marketing funnel, it tracks all the steps leading up to your
sales or checkout page. Vital information for raising
your conversion rate and ROI.

You may be placed on a waiting list for this highly in
demand service from Google.

LINK http://www.google.com/analytics/

2. Google Sitemaps

Webmasters can use Google Sitemaps to almost instantly place
newly created pages on their site into the Google Search Index.
This is an XML file that is uploaded to Google as new pages
are added on your site. Needless to say this can be a valuable
service for any webmaster or marketer who wants to get their
information on the web quickly.

LINK https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html

3. Google Alerts

Be notified when someone or another site lists your site
or mentions your name. Great way to keep track of all your
online activities. Great way to monitor all your online
business interests and products.

LINK http://www.google.com/alerts

4. Google Froogle

Froogle is Google’s price directory! It simply lists all
the cheapest prices for different products on the web.
For marketers and webmasters who are promoting products,
it should be studied and analyzed. Optimizing your
site’s content for Froogle may prove to be very beneficial.

Follow Froogle or Google directions exactly on how to
list or display products on your site. Froogle will
spider your site and display your prices and products
to thousands of targeted customers. That, as they say,
is priceless.

LINK http://froogle.google.com/

5. Google Checkout

Not exactly free but for those marketers who use AdWords
— for every $1 spent on AdWords you can process $10 for free.
You can also place the shopping cart logo on your AdWords ad
and take advantage of the prestige and trust the Google
brand name has built up.

Over time marketers may find this tool to be very
effective and valuable.

LINK https://checkout.google.com/

6. Google eBlogger

Blogging has become vitally important to the health and
functioning of your web site. No site should be without
at least one blog and RSS feed. Creating a blog (online journal)
on the topic of your web site or product will bring in extra traffic
and targeted customers. eBlogger is a simple free
blogging service that even lets you publish or post your blog
files to your own web site server. Keep in mind, each blog
has that all important Google Blog Search bar.

LINK http://www.blogger.com/

7. Google Toolbar – Enterprise Version

Try the new enterprise version of the Google Toolbar
for your company or business. Integrates countless
features with all your employees or corporate
network. These could include a common customer
database, company calendar, financial news…

Keep in mind, Google also ranks every page it indexes on
a scale of 0-10. While it is important to know the Page Rank of
your own pages, it is even more important to know the PR of
your competitor’s pages. You can use the toolbar to get
the PR of each page you’re visiting. Extremely helpful
information for webmasters and marketers to know when
forming online linking or business arrangements.

LINK http://toolbar.google.com/T4/enterprise/

8. Google Groups

Every marketer knows the important of having a large
contact list of people with a similar interest. Social
networking will play an ever increasing role in your
success on the web. Just look at the growing popularity
of sites like MySpace and LiveJournal.

Google groups is another form of social and business
networking that every marketer should be aware of and
pursuing.

LINK http://groups.google.com/

9. Google Adsense

One simple way to monetize your web content is to
use Google Adsense. Just place the Adsense code
on your site and receive a check from Google each
month. For webmasters who are not really into
online marketing (does such creatures exist?) Adsense
can be a painless way to earn extra income from
your site.

For professional marketers using the Adsense system can
supply a tremendous amount of marketing information on the
keywords in their particular niche. It keeps the
marketer informed on what keywords are being bid
on and how much advertisers are willing to pay.

Adsense also has an excellent real-time tracking
system you can use to keep track of all your
important web pages.

LINK https://www.google.com/adsense/

10. Google Writely

A recent addition to Google’s stable of free products.
Writely is a full featured online writing editor with
spellcheck and great collaborating features. It also
lets you publish your content directly to your blogs.
One feature that may be of interest to marketers, it lets
your save files in the popular download format of PDF.

Lets face it, until video takes over the web in four
or five years time — the written word is still king on the
net. It is the medium that markets, promotes and sells
your content or products. Writely will help you write better.

LINK http://www.writely.com

Honorable Mention – Google Trends

This Google program will let you search popular trends,
important for marketers searching for the latest hot
product to promote. You can also break down these trends
by different regions.

LINK http://www.google.com/trends

Final Note

Please take note that signing up for a Google account will
usually help you in obtaining most of these free services or
programs. Some of these programs may have to be applied for
individually. But be assured, all these free Google marketing
tools are well worth your time and effort. They will make your
marketing easier and they will help any webmaster or marketer
run their online business more efficiently.

…
The author is a full-time online marketer who runs numerous web sites, including two sites on Internet marketing. For the latest web marketing tools try: Internet Marketing Tools Everyone is profiting from Google, why not you? Click here: Google Cash File Copyright © 2006 Titus Hoskins. This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.

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