In great news, Google, Yahoo and MSN have agreed upon a XML sitemap standard.

What’s this mean to you? Well, you just need to create one XML sitemap and you can submit it to all three engines. I’ve been doing that for a while and didn’t seem to have any problem but now it’s official.

Why should you create an XML sitemap? An XML sitemap outlines all the URLs on a site so that search engines can find them all easily. Much like a normal sitemap, it just lists all the pages however, an XML sitemap is optimized for search engines, not for people. By giving search engines a list of URLs on your site, you are increasing the number of pages they know about and can refer traffic to.

If you posted once a day for a year, you’d have 365 post pages. That doesn’t include categories, archives and any other blog related pages. Since the numbers add up so quickly, it’s hard for a search engine to keep up and even harder for a user to keep them organized so that an engine can find them all easily. An XML sitemap gives engines one file full of all the URLs on your site, optimized just for them.

“Why should I use del.icio.us?” is a question I got the other day. It seems that del.icio.us provides no search engine love as it blocks the bookmarks with nofollow tags, yet it is very valuable.

What del.icio.us is good for is exposure. Lots of people use del.icio.us to not only store their own bookmarks but find new and interesting websites. I know that sites like LifeHacker sometimes posts on what is popular in del.icio.us too. This then turns in to a very valuable link back to your site.

What you are really doing is trying to create buzz and visibility for an article or a site that you think is interesting. It’s not about spamming link building for search engines.

Lets not forget that del.icio.us is owned by Yahoo and who knows what Yahoo might do with del.icio.us. They could do away with the nofollow tags or possibly use it to influence their own rankings. Only time will tell.

I would continue to use del.icio.us as an avenue for social bookmarking and exposure because it’s the most popular and most used social bookmarking site out there. However, also look into other services too. Sites like Spurl.net are more search engine friendly and can actually dual post to del.icio.us also. Now you are hitting two good sites with one bookmark.

I’ve just added Feedblitz’ subscribe via email as an option on this blog. (under categories on the right)

If you think about it, subscribe via email is something every blog should have as not everyone knows what a feed is or how it all works. For every one person that knows about feeds, there are probably 10 that have no idea. However, almost everyone knows what emails is. So having a subscribe via email is an option all blogs should have.

There are quite a few services out there and one seems to be just as good as the other. I like Feedblitz as it allows me to see who’s subscribed to my blog and I can export the emails too. For an additional cost, I can also design the email templates. Other feed to email services include R|Mail, RSSFwd & Yahoo Alerts.

I’m sure there are may more, what do you like & why?

[tags]feedblitz,rmail,yahoo,email,rssfwd[/tags]