There has been a ton of advice on the internet, and Google even recommends it in one of their google webmaster tools to generate more traffic for your site.

"Submit a Sitemap to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover."

You can view more details about this from the google website: Google SiteMap Information

 I did a quick search online and found this website: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com

 It generated a nicely formated sitemap of my site, but another benefit of having this site map is actually analyzing the links. I found 10 occurences of links that were included in the index was simply an inccorect link.

 For example, there was a link out to yahoo.ca but instead of it linking out to yahoo.ca, it was being treated like a page within my site: http://snaptopic.com/yahoo.ca which simply doesn't exist. 

In summary, site map is a great way to not only help Google find your site's content, but another way to verify the linking architecture of your site. 

 

This analysis was done because one of the websites I was working on requires the expansion to different cities using the same platform. It required the product team to quickly do some research on the best approach based on a few factors and make a decision. Below outlines some of our research findings:

 

Introduction:

There are three main criteria identified to selecting a URL structure:

1.    SEO impact analysis - look at the advantages and disadvantages
2.    Implementation difficulties
3.    User Experience and Usability in understanding the hierarchy and locality of the site

There are two main structures being analyzed:

1.    Folder Structure:
a.    http://domain.com/vancouver/places/entity
b.    http://domain.com/toronto/places/entity
c.    http://domain.com/montreal/places/entity

2.    Sub Domain Structure:
a.    http://vancouver.domain.com/places/entity
b.    http://toronto.domain.com/places/entity
c.    http://montreal.domain.com/places/entity

SEO Impact Analysis:

The following links highlight the main debate on the impact of the different URL structures on SEO (primarily based upon the ability of Google to index pages and pagerank)

I.    http://www.v7n.com/forums/seo-forum/30267-folders-versus-subdomains.html
II.    http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/
III.    http://www.textlinkbrokers.com/blog/comments/377_0_1_0_C2/

In summary it is more beneficial for using folder structures (for local regional websites) because it is easier to set up and the existing link values of the main domain (domain.com) will automatically be apply to the folder structure. It will allow us to leverage the currently credibility of the domain.com domain and use it to propel other city searches to the top.

In a sub domain structure, each sub domain is considered as a separate domain which means it will require us to once again establish credibility and link presence with all the major search engines.

Implementation Difficulties:

Folder Structure:

I.    Requires the modification of the URL rewrite rule to add and indicate the city that each user is currently on
II.    Requires a DNS level change to redirect old requests (toronto.domain) to the new urls (domain.com/toronto)

Sub Domain Structure:

I.    Create domain host entries and configure the local system of each developer’s host file to allow sub domain (Not Tested)
a.    http://www.mattephraim.com/blog/2008/05/14/taming-visual-studios-web-server/
II.    Creating DNS entries each time for each sub domain (currently this process is handled by the system administrator)
III.    Signing up for new Google Map Service API for each city and storing it in some settings file
IV.    There might be session and cookie problems and making it available across different sub domains
V.    Authentication across domains might need further configuration (user logged in on Toronto might need to re-login on Vancouver)
VI.    URL rewrite rules will need to be modified to handle sub domains
VII.    Domain licenses might prevent us from using the same applications/plug-ins etc on the same server (increasing cost)

User Experience:

Just a quick note, we probably could get more information when we ask several design firms with experience in understanding customer needs but a quick glance at various review websites and how they treat regional content indicates that a folder structure seems to be the best approach.

I.    Yelp
II.    TrustedPlaces
III.    InsiderPages
IV.    WeLoveLocal
V.    DocoLogo

While doing development on a login system using the ASP.net 2.0 Membership Provider, I ran into the problem of resetting the user's password. Thought about using Membership.GeneratePassword which doesn't word as intended because even if I call the method GeneratePassword (10, 0), there are still non-alphanumerical characters being included. The problem is that the second parameter, is a minimum. 

More information about the method can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.security.membership.generatepassword.aspx

Therefore I ended up writing some custom code to reset a user's password:

 

 

MembershipUser user = Membership.GetUser(Email.Value); if (null != user) { String Password = user.ResetPassword(); String NewPassword = CreateRandomPassword(10); user.ChangePassword(Password, NewPassword); // DO MORE PROCESSING HERE ... ie. Send out Email }

 And the method for creating a random password would be:

 
  public static String CreateRandomPassword(Int32 PasswordLength) { String _allowedChars = "abcdefghijkmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789"; Random randNum = new Random(); char[] chars = new char[PasswordLength]; Int32 allowedCharCount = _allowedChars.Length; for (Int32 i = 0; i < PasswordLength; i++) { chars[i] = _allowedChars[(Int32)((_allowedChars.Length) * randNum.NextDouble())]; } return new String(chars); }

 

After a couple of days of researching online and finding directories and opportunities to create back-links to my site, I ran a search today on Google for site:localwoot.com and found out there are now three new pages being indexed by Google. A few forums that I recently joined on this topic have indexed LocalWoot based on the forum signature with a link back to LocalWoot. I wonder if it’s a good strategy to link to some of the deeper pages (Recreational Listing).

A side benefits to this linking strategy is that it is driving people to the site which is the GOAL of the operation. Once a solid credibility has been established on these forums, I would begin to solicit feedback for a page tailored to the forum. Especially on this page, I’ve added the little addthis plug-in for people to easily bookmark or share the page.

Using the Webmaster tool of Google, (https://www.google.com/webmasters), I found that the page was last accessed and crawled on the 7th of July which is a bit before my recent changes. The goal is to continue creating back-links to the site for the next while to boost the credibility of Localwoot.com. The website is still receiving a PageRank of 0 thus far.

Next Post Should be about Google’s Sandbox and how it affects new websites like Localwoot.com

This is the first post in a series of posts relating to the journey of creating a startup and experimenting with different theories of product development. The site was completed in “alpha” mode with parks and golf places in the province of Ontario. These two types of location will give us a solid set of data to work with to test out if the site’s vision and the ability of getting the site indexed by Google.

 

First Step:

 

Get at least the homepage listed as quickly as possible. I believe this to be a mistake because we had the homepage live to the public without any internal linkage. That means when Google indexed our website the first time, it only picked up our homepage. First week, the homepage is listed! We just added internal links to some of our directly which would hopefully allow Google to pick up our listing pages which is the goal.

 

Second Step:

 

Noticing that the homepage is already listed by Google, it is time to boost the page rank of the site.

 

1. Went to http://www.prchecker.info/ to check the current page rank and got a rank of N/A which could possibly mean a variety of things.
   1. I am just hoping since the web page is new that it is not completely index by Google just yet.

 

1. Followed the tips of SEO experts online to get it listed on several domains:
   1. Created a profile on AboutUs.org
   2. Created an account on GetSatisfaction.com which serves two purposes. Getting the LocalWoot name out there and allow us to facilitate feedback from our users regarding the site
   3. Did a scan with Builtwith which also created a profile for us
   4. Created a link from my own personal site (with PageRank 4, although the content of the site is irrelevant for LocalWoot)

If you see this post it means that BlogEngine.NET 1.3 is running and the hard part of creating your own blog is done. There is only one thing you need to do from this point on to take full advantage of the blog and that is to set up the first author profile.

Write Permissions

To be able to log in to the blog and writing posts, you need to enable write permissions on the App_Data folder. If you’re blog is hosted at a hosting provider, you can either log into your account’s admin page or call the support. You need write permissions on the App_Data folder because all posts and comments are saved as XML files and placed in the App_Data folder.

Username and password

When you've got write permissions to the App_Data folder, you need to change the username and password. Find the sign-in link located either at the bottom or top of the page depending on your current theme and click it. Now enter "admin" in both the username and password fields and click the button. You will now see an admin menu appear. It has a link to the "Users" admin page. From there you can change the username and password.

On the web

You can find BlogEngine.NET on the official website. Here you'll find tutorials, documentation, tips and tricks and much more. The ongoing development of BlogEngine.NET can be followed at CodePlex where the daily builds will be published for anyone to download.

Good luck and happy writing.

The BlogEngine.NET team