Leadership Viewpoint

Another nice (and smart) thing to do for your new website is to start an account with Google. Google is the largest of the search engines, and much more. Its offerings will be the topic of more than one entry. Both of these services are free.

SITEMAP

Most non-developers think a sitemap is the page that illustrates the layout of a website. I put a people sitemap on my website so that visitors can quickly look to see if their topic is covered. Among webmasters, however, there is another, more technical sitemap that is important to the spiders/robots that search the web. We want to help the robots find every page on our site, since that makes it easier for the search engines to list our pages. To make a sitemap, go to XML-sitemaps and follow their directions. Your initial URL should be your home page. Then upload the sitemap into the Public HTML file on your host server. Register with Google and follow their directions to add your sitemap.

ANALYTICS

If you are using Hostmonster for your site, you are already receiving a good bit of information on your website visitors. Google also offers very rich analysis of your website’s activity, with some different aspects and analysis. To get yourself set-up, go to Google Analytics and sign up for your free account. They will provide you with some code. Copy it and paste it into your page HTML via Webstudio Between the Header and Body. As a reminder of how to get there, double-click on the background of each page to open the ‘Object Properties’ dialog box. Go to the ‘Page HTML’ tab, and click on the ‘Between Header and Body’ option. Copy and paste the code from Google into this section on each page and save it. Then upload it to your host. Return to Google in about a week, and you’ll be amazed by the richness of the data that they are providing to you.

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