By : Nidhi Gupta

What is a Google Sitemap?

A Google Sitemap is a very simple XML document that lists all the pages in your website, but the Google Sitemaps program is actually much more important than that. In fact, the Sitemaps program provides a little peek inside Google’s mind - and it can tell you a lot about what Google thinks of your website!

Why Should You Use Google Sitemaps?

Until Google Sitemaps was released in the summer of 2005, optimizing a site for Google was a guessing game at best. A website’s page might be deleted from the index, and the Webmaster had no idea why. Alternatively, a site’s content could be scanned, but because of the peculiarities of the algorithm, the only pages that would rank well might be the “About Us” page, or the company’s press releases.

As webmasters we were at the whim of Googlebot, the seemingly arbitrary algorithmic kingmaker that could make or break a website overnight through shifts in search engine positioning. There was no way to communicate with Google about a website - either to understand what was wrong with it, or to tell Google when something had been updated.

That all changed about a year ago when Google released Sitemaps, but the program really became useful in February of 2006 when Google updated it with a couple new tools.

So, what exactly is the Google Sitemaps program, and how can you use it to improve the position of your website? Well, there are essentially two reasons to use Google Sitemaps:

1. Sitemaps provide you with a way to tell Google valuable information about your website
2. You can use Sitemaps to learn what Google thinks about your website

What You Can Tell Google About Your Site

Believe it or not, Google is concerned about making sure webmasters have a way of communicating information that is important about their sites. Although Googlebot does a pretty decent job of finding and cataloging web pages, it has very little ability to rate the relative importance of one page versus another. After all, many important pages on the Internet are not properly “optimized”, and many of the people who couldn’t care less about spending their time on linking campaigns create some of the best content.

Therefore, Google gives you the ability to tell them on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0 how important a given page is relative to all the others. Using this system, you might tell Google that your home page is a 1.0, each of your product sections is a 0.8, and each of your individual product pages is a 0.5. Pages like your company’s address and contact information might only rate a 0.2.

You can also tell Google how often your pages are updated and the date that each page was last modified. For example your home page might be updated every day, while a particular product page might only be updated on an annual basis.

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By : Admin

It’s been a year since Google Inc. launched its much-anticipated payment service, and most of us would be curious whether a company known best for its search engine can deliver a money service as good as industry leader PayPal. However, Google Checkout is much easy to use. It gives better display of your account options and transaction could be completed in fewer steps.

Both are free to set up and make payments, and signing up is easy but Checkout works well as an online wallet, and PayPal functions more like a bank account. Also Google accepts payments via credit or debit cards only, while PayPal lets you withdraw funds from a regular bank account.

The highlight of Checkout is its consistency and simplicity. On the other hand PayPal’s look and feel varies, and it’s not as seamless as Checkout. And Like Checkout, PayPal offers merchants various ways to integrate the service with their own online stores. That’s good because sole proprietors will have different needs from a large merchant. But while the back end may vary, Checkout manages to make the front end appear consistent to the customer.

Google claims tens of thousands of merchants accepting Checkout, compared with millions claimed by PayPal. Checkout isn’t accepted where it counts. Also, online auctioneer eBay Inc, which owns PayPal, doesn’t allow its auction sellers to accept payments from Checkout. Unlike Checkout, PayPal sometimes lets you make one-time payments without creating an account.

Checkout will sometimes give merchants your billing address and the last four digits of your credit card as well, while PayPal says it won’t unless you use the one-time option. On the other hand, PayPal shares your e-mail address with merchants that request it, while Checkout lets you keep that private and Google will forward receipts and other important e-mails to you.

Also, With PayPal, you can receive money in about 50 countries, while Checkout accepts US and UK merchants only. And while PayPal is offered in 17 currencies, Checkout deals only with dollars and pounds. Most importantly, Checkout won’t let you receive money with regular accounts, you’d need a special merchant account and provide a Social Security number or federal tax identification number.

With Checkout, you either have a regular account for making payments only or a merchant account for receiving payments. PayPal offers three types of accounts, all letting people send and receive payments, but each with different fees and restrictions. You also have additional options within each account type to boost your trust level.

With both Checkout and PayPal, consumers are charged nothing to send money or make payments. While in Checkout Merchants are charged based on transaction amounts, fees depend on your account type With PayPal. The crux of the matter is, Checkout is much simpler than the PayPal however, until it is more widely accepted and adopted by merchants we have to deal with PayPal’s complexities to fully engage in e-commerce.

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