When you create a website to sell a product or market something, you want traffic and you want it bad. After all, you could have the best looking site in the world and if no one visits then it is just another pretty site – one that won’t make you any moola.  In order to gain more traffic, you’ll want your site to rank fairly high in search engine listings. Including a sitemap can help you get ranked more easily and achieve a higher ranking. Below, we’ll discuss why you need a sitemap for your site.

What is a Sitemap?

A sitemap is basically a document within your site that explains each URL within the site, it’s use, how important it is, and more. Most website builders allow you to automatically create a sitemap, and it’s advisable that you do it.

Why Do You Need a Sitemap?

Sitemaps are particularly useful to the search engines because they explain how the site should be indexed. While it’s not necessary to have a sitemap on every website, it is great for certain ones. For example, if your site is brand new and doesn’t have a lot of links to it yet, a sitemap can help it get indexed more easily. Similarly, if your site has pages that aren’t indexed easily (like flash pages), the sitemap helps search engines index the site.

In general, website owners have found that although a sitemap isn’t necessary on all sites, it can be beneficial for some. Therefore, having a sitemap will not hurt your website if you don’t really need it, but not having one when you do need it will be damaging. It can keep you from obtaining the rankings you need in order to gain more traffic.

A sitemap helps your site get indexed by search engines, and those search engines will list your site under your most popular keywords. This allows individuals who are searching the internet for particular things to find your website. Of course, when people can more easily find your website, you’re more likely to obtain sales and earn profits. Using a sitemap is important, and if you’ve just created a website, it is a smart thing to add.

I’ve got to be honest with you – I have been seriously thinking about going into the site flipping business and what I’ve discovered through all my research is that the market isn’t very good for start up businesses or sites that have no income, history or traffic. However, it is much better for more established sites or ones that have verifiable income, history, etc.

If you’re like me, you might be looking for additional ways to make money. Well, one way that I’ve been considering is flipping websites for profit. What I’ve discovered is that it is a whole lot easier to sell established sites than startups. This is because the market is tight and individuals are looking for verifiable businesses to invest in – ones that have a proven history of delivering profits. And, who could blame them? Here’s some reasons why it makes more sense to sell established sites:

Traffic Factor

One of the most important factors in how much a website is worth and how easy it will be to flip is traffic. Websites that are brand new usually have little to no traffic, while established sites have been indexed longer and receive traffic from search engines. Obviously, people are more willing to purchase sites that have a lot of traffic than those that don’t have any traffic. This is one reason that flipping start-up sites is harder than established sites.

It’s also easy to go into the tracking tools of a website to find out the most popular keywords or ways that individuals find the site, and then use that information to your advantage. With a start-up site, it’s impossible and you’ll have to either go in blindly or do research to determine what the best keywords to the site might be.

Verifiable Income Baby!

Websites that are more established and have more traffic will naturally make more money than a website that is brand new. Investors or those looking to buy websites want to know that it’s going to be a good investment. With a start-up, there is more risk than there is with an established site that is already making money. This is another reason that flipping start-ups is harder than flipping established sites.

This is not to say that it’s impossible to flip start-ups and make money from them. However, overall you should expect to make less money from start-up sites than you will for established sites that make more money and have more traffic. Depending upon how much time you invest in each start-up, it can be worth it or not.

What will you do?

If you’ve created a great website that is performing well as far as traffic and revenue goes, you might consider selling it for a nice profit. Website flipping is a very popular market today, and many entrepreneurs create or buy websites, make them perform well, and then ‘flip,’ or sell them for profit. However, sometimes, a website is worth holding onto. Below, we’ll discuss the question ‘should you hold or flip your site?’

Revenue

The most important thing to consider is the revenue when you’re determining whether to flip or hold your site. Think about how much you’ve got coming in each month, and then think about what you might expect to receive if you sold it. Steady income that is passive is very valuable, so if you’re making quite a bit of money each month, you might want to hold that website. However, if you are proficient at making websites that perform well, you might want to sell it for the lump payment from whomever purchases the site.

Spend a good bit of time thinking about the revenue and use the information you come up with to determine whether it would be best to flip or hold your site in terms of money.

When You Need Money

If you’re an entrepreneur and you need money, flipping your site might be the best idea. It’s possible to get quite a lot of money if the website receives a lot of traffic and if it’s bringing in a monthly income. The benefit of flipping the website is that you’ll receive a lump payment from the person who purchases it, and this can be helpful if you need the money at the time. In most instances, you will typically receive 10-20 months of income and this can help out tremendously.

Considering Your Schedule

If you just don’t have the time to invest in your website anymore, you might want to flip it. Not only will it free up your time, but the money can be great. Think about the revenue, whether or not you need money now or can benefit from the site’s monthly income, and your schedule before deciding whether flipping or holding your website would be best.

As you probably know, Google updates site page rank (PR) every 4 months or so and the last update occurred on April 2nd. With each passing day, everyone (including me) is anxiously waiting for the PR to increase. Now, before you get all frustrated, you must remember that Google is Google and they are never ever typical. They are like a physician in a busy doctor’s office, they like to keep you waiting. So, instead of getting depressed that your page rank won’t update there are some things you can do about it. Ready?

1. Stop stressing and strike back. For every day that you don’t get a PR update, make it a point to get 5-10 quality backlinks so that you can show Google that you don’t really care about their Pagerank ranking system.

2. Focus on increasing your Alexa ranking instead. After all, with a better Alexa rank, you’l most likely see a PR increase anyway so you can’t go wrong.

3. Google “Why My PR won’t change or Why Google doesn’t like my great site” and then write post after post complaining about how frustrated you are about Google, how you can’t stand them and how you wish they would get their act together. By doing this, you’ll feel better and if you only choose do-follow sites, with higher PR than you have, you could actually increase your backlinks and ummm your ranking too.

4. Bookmark PR checker sites. Visit sites like Google Page Rank Update and check them every 10 minutes to see if your PR has been updated.

5. Stare at the Google PR and will it with your mind to change, change, change. If you can’t bear to see that PR move, you can always go on strike and start using Bing until Google updates your PR.

As for me, I plan on doing 1, 2,3, 4 and 5 (in that order) until I see some Google love or upward movement in my rankings. What about you?

When I first started setting up websites I honestly didn’t even think about the importance of PR. I simply built some quality sites, did a bit of article marketing and hoped for the best. It wasn’t until I got deep into internet marketing that I realized how very important PR is and how it really does matter. Ever so often, I get a few emails from newbies about the importance of PR and whether or not it really matters. Well, this post will attempt to explain this issue a bit more.

Basically Google ranks websites from 1 to 10, with a PR10 being the best. Very few sites are rated a 9 or 10, and one example is Wikipedia. Now, the reason Wikipedia has such a high rating is because they are considered an ‘authority’ site. They have many incoming links from high-quality sites, especially in comparison with the number of links going out. This makes the site more important in the eyes of Google, and with high-quality content and keywords, the PR can really rise.

Many people aren’t sure whether it matters, but when you’re considering offering spots for advertising, it does matter. People will take a good look at your Google PageRank before determining whether they want to place an ad on your site. The higher your page rank is, the more advertisers you’ll have lined up to place an ad on your site. For instance, if you have steady traffic, good PR and a decent Alexa score you can make money from ad sites like backlinks.com, buysellads.com and more.

Sound good? Well, there are many ways to increase your page rank, including:
- Obtaining more links back to your site, especially from high page ranks. It’s even better if there aren’t that many outbound links on your site.

- Using high-quality content that is relevant to your site’s theme. Strategically placed keywords can help as well, but too many keywords are a bad idea and will be classified as keyword stuffing.

- Provide valuable information for viewers, allowing them to be able to link to your site in confidence.

By increasing your Google PageRank, you can gain more advertisers willing to pay for spots on your website, enabling you to make more money and increase your income streams. Check out how to automatically increase your PageRank now.