Microsys Blog

Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Company



Category: Marketing

Improvements in A1 Sitemap Generator 1.5.x branch

9 October, 2007 (14:05) | A1 Sitemap Generator, HTML sitemaps, Products, Search engine optimization, XML sitemaps

For those of you creating XML sitemaps using A1 Sitemap Generator there are some excellent news.

I have been hard at work in engineering the website scanner engine with a special focus on improving the already fast crawler while also have it consume much less memory. I am happy to report I succeeded at both :)

Overall this update focused on:

  • Increase crawler speed
  • Minimize memory usage
  • Various user interface improvements
  • Various crawler engine improvements

If you are already a registered user of A1 Sitemap Generator, updating is as easy as downloading and installing the newest version.

Analyze internal linking structure with A1 Website Analyzer

6 October, 2007 (16:00) | A1 Website Analyzer, Linking structure, Products, Website analysis

With the new release of A1 Website Analyzer it has become easier to understand the internal linking structure of websites. Our website analysis program can help you see detailed information about all pages in a website, useful if you are trying to understand how page rank and link algorithms distribute across the site.

After scanning, you can view data for all pages. 5 columns in particular will be of interest to you:

  • linked by internal
  • links to internal
  • links to external
  • calculated “importance” score
  • importance score scaled

The importance takes into effect the respective strength of all pages and links within your website. Example: A link carries more weight if it resides on a highly linked page that contains few links. The scaled importance is logarithmic and assigns a value between 0 and 10.

In addition to above data, A1 Website Analyzer also shows document character set, file size, response time etc. As a small extra bonus, you can even have your entire website scanned for HTML errors. That is, however, slightly slow since it uses the online W3C HTML validator API – and takes much care not to stress it :-) .

Differences between text, HTML, RSS, ROR and XML sitemaps

1 July, 2007 (23:52) | A1 Sitemap Generator, HTML sitemaps, Marketing, Search engine optimization, XML sitemaps

Earlier today I wrote an article with a comparison of website sitemaps. The sitemap types explained include:

  • Text file sitemaps.
  • HTML and XHTML sitemaps.
  • RSS sitemaps – RSS feed sitemaps are often used by blogs.
  • ROR sitemaps – really RSS feed sitemaps with some custom extensions.
  • XML sitemaps – also called Google Sitemaps and XML Sitemaps Protocol.

In my comparison of different site map kinds, I also explain:

  • Background information and history
  • Level of support by search engines
  • Common and best usage tips and tricks
  • Complete sitemap file examples

Have you ever wondered if ROR is actual RSS + some extensions? And howcome XHTML, ROR, RSS and XML sitemaps protocol all use XML, but still result in 3½ ;) different sitemaps? Then read my article about website sitemap differences today! :)

Article about solving website crawling problems

1 July, 2007 (22:23) | A1 Sitemap Generator, HTML sitemaps, Marketing, Search engine optimization, Website analysis, XML sitemaps

I have recently written an article about crawling of websites which explains and shows how to solve many common crawling problems.

Things covered include:

  • Having multiple domains with mirrored and/or distributed content.
  • Consistent usage of www (or not) in front of domain names.
  • Usage of Javascript for navigation.
  • Broken links and redirects.

And many other things, about 10 in total, that can result in problems for a website crawler. The article focuses on solving all website crawl and scan problems using A1 Sitemap Generator. For those who have websites where crawler problems can not be solved, the article also shows how you can still create complete HTML and XML sitemaps for your website by configuring the sitemap creator program.

Read the article and make your website crawlable by search engines now! :)

Grow your keyword lists with tumblers, permutations and typos

21 June, 2007 (00:48) | A1 Keyword Research, Google Adwords, Marketing, Pay per click, Search engine optimization

In this post I am going to talk about the keyword explosion tools A1 Keyword Research has for growing an existing keyword list. A future post will address how it can research and build keyword lists nearly from scratch.

We are going to address following issues:

  • Combine and tumble keyword lists
  • Permutation of phrases in a keyword list
  • How to cover typo and spelling errors
  • Various tools to clean your keyword lists

Grow your keywords list with these tools

How to combine and tumble keyword lists together:

Assume you have following 3 keyword lists:

Keyword list group #1:

  • keywords
  • keyword

Keyword list group #2:

  • research
  • marketing

Keyword list group #3:

  • program
  • software
  • tool

Use tumble to input to get following keyword phrases:

  • keyword marketing program
  • keyword marketing software
  • keyword marketing tool
  • keyword research program
  • keyword research software
  • keyword research tool
  • keywords marketing program
  • keywords marketing software
  • keywords marketing tool
  • keywords research program
  • keywords research software
  • keywords research tool

Have permutation cover all word orders in all phrases:

Assume you have following keyword phrase in “input”:

  • keyword marketing program

The word order tool can permutate above sentence into:

  • keyword marketing program
  • keyword program marketing
  • marketing keyword program
  • marketing program keyword
  • program keyword marketing
  • program marketing keyword

How to take your keyword lists to the next level:

Can you imagine the number of thousands of phrases above two tools can generate for you? Well, we are not done! :) Do you have customers that found you using spelling and typo errors in their searches? Probably not… But maybe you will soon. Move your keyword list into “input” and get ready to use following 3 tools:

  • “Missing space”. Example: “keyword research” adds “keywordresearch”.
  • “Missing letter”. Example: “keyword marketing” adds “keyword markeing”, “keyword markting” etc.
  • “Switched letter”. Example: “keyword tool” adds e.g. “kewyord tool”, “keywrod tool” etc.

Cleaning and sorting your final keyword list:

Everyone is different, but if you like to have neat keywords lists here are the tools you need:

  • Filter on min/max characters/words
  • Filter on allow list of characters (to remove illegal)
  • Lower case all keyword phrases
  • Sort keyword phrases
  • Trim for superfluous spaces
  • Remove words repeated, e.g. “phrase phrase expansion”
  • Remove phrase duplicates, e.g. “research program” and “research program”
  • Remove permutations, e.g. “keywords explode” and “explode keywords”

Above is just one of many tools available in A1 Keyword Research. I will showcase more of them in this blog as time permits :)

A1 Sitemap Generator advantages

9 May, 2007 (13:34) | A1 Sitemap Generator, HTML sitemaps, Marketing, Products, Search engine optimization, XML sitemaps

Some time ago I created my first ever video about A1 Sitemap Generator and XML sitemaps as used by Google, Yahoo and other search engines.

However, one response I got was the question:
“You should tell us why we should pay you $39.00, when so many others are free!”

My initial response was “and so many of them are IMO crap” :)

I often get emails from people who have tried them all ending up very frustrated until they tried my tool.

Some unique features and benefits:

  • For medicore sized websites, like 50.000 to 100.000 pages, my program can give much better linking and redirect information for all pages than other tools.
  • Do you have a website large than above numbers? If you can live without detailed information like how all pages link with each other, you can change some scanning options and the limit becomes ~350.000.
  • A1 Sitemap Generator can also calculate priority values for pages based on internal linking structure. Simply put, The more linked a page is, the higher its priority value.

Some website scanning options:

  • Support for website crawler to “login” and scan password protected areas.
  • Optionally obey robots.txt and nofollow/noidex attributes.
  • Can go through proxies.
  • Change useragent ID.
  • Find links in CSS and javascript.
  • Verify links to external pages still exist.
  • Cutout session IDs.

Some sitemap creation options:

  • Very rich HTML sitemap template system.
  • Can automatically GZip XML sitemaps.
  • Split sitemaps into multiple files when a limit is reached, e.g. 50.000 pages per XML sitemap.
  • Create sitemap index file of generated XML sitemap files.

And those are just the simplest options. For those who need more control about website scanning and sitemap creation, they have it. There are also some qualities that are hard to explain, but still exist. For example how many types of links are correctly understood and normalized.

If I had to mention one more thing, it would be the sitemap/ignore/output filters one can configure the website scanner with. This, together with the automation support, makes is doable to maintain sitemaps for huge websites since one can very finely split scanning into sections. I believe I also here offer more options for the webmaster compared to the competition.

If you have suggestion as to what you would like more information about in future videos, please let me by posting a comment :-)

Search engines improve XML sitemaps with robots.txt

12 April, 2007 (16:18) | A1 Sitemap Generator, Marketing, Search engine optimization, XML sitemaps

After Google/Yahoo/MSN announced support for XML sitemaps protocol, it was only a matter of time before more would follow. Yesterday it was announced that Ask.com and IBM have been added to the list of XML sitemap protocol supporters.

One of the hottest news seem to be that it is now possible to link your xml sitemap from your robots.txt file.

You can simply add this line to your robots.txt file:
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

I think this change will help make the XML sitemaps protocol a widely used standard. The primary reason being it enables search engines to automatically discover XML sitemaps on their own.

For more information, you can check two recent blog posts by Google and Yahoo.

A1 Website Download 1.1.5 released

30 March, 2007 (23:50) | A1 Website Download, Marketing, News

  • Fixed a minor issue in the embedded viewer for downloaded websites.
  • Added BOM checking to help identify the character set used in HTML documents.
  • Made the HTML parser much faster and improved crawler memory usage.
  • Fixed an issue with website login functionality.

Read more about A1 Website Download or try it now

A1 Website Analyzer 1.1.6 released

30 March, 2007 (02:15) | A1 Website Analyzer, Marketing, News, Website analysis

  • Made the HTML parser much faster and improved crawler memory usage.
  • Updated various suggest, position, research tools and their configurations.
  • Online tools can now also integrate with websites that use POST forms.
  • Fixed an issue with website login functionality.
  • Added BOM checking to help identify the character set used in HTML documents.

Read more about A1 Website Analyzer or try it now

A1 Sitemap Generator 1.4.4 released

14 March, 2007 (18:03) | A1 Sitemap Generator, HTML sitemaps, Marketing, News, Search engine optimization, XML sitemaps

  • Made the HTML parser much faster
  • Added BOM checking (in addition to server response headers and the “charset” meta tag) to identify the character set used in HTML documents
  • Korean translation by Eunsook Kim, http://www.famun.com
  • Fixed a bug concerning reading UTF8 translation files with a leading BOM
  • Fixed a bug concerning website crawler ignore filters
  • Fixed an issue in ASP.Net sitemaps (these can be used in ASP.Net controls)
  • Fixed a bug related to LastMod in XML sitemaps

Read more about A1 Sitemap Generator or try it now