Yesterday I discussed how I screwed up and lost the domain name for my video blog Videolicio.us and as a result had to buy a new domain, Videolicious.tv, and start rebuilding my traffic from scratch.
Here, then, begins a series of posts about how to market a blog. I will document my progress as I try to rebuild the traffic and audience I had lost.
XML Sitemaps
After configuring Videolicious.tv to point to my blog (this typically involves configuring your domain name settings, your hosting settings if you self-host, and your blog settings to use the new domain), I needed to update my XML Sitemap.
If you’re new to the subject, XML Sitemaps are files intended solely for search engines to read. They tell search engines where to find all the pages on your site so the engines can easily index them. The files are placed in the root directory of a given site (you can see the sitemap for Videolicious.tv at http://videolicious.tv/sitemap.xml) and the file name is always sitemap.xml. You can visit Sitemaps.org to learn more about the subject and I’ve got a list of sitemap generators at my Delicious account here.
If you generate your sitemap manually, you’ll just need to create one using your favorite tool and then upload that file to your root directory. In my case, though, I use a wonderful WordPress plugin called, appropriately enough, XML Sitemap Generator, so I just needed to reconfigure the plugin and rebuild the sitemap so all the links within it point to the .tv domain rather than the .us domain.
XML Vengence
The very next thing I did, out of spite, was to use Google Webmaster tools to tell Google to remove any links to the videolicio.us domain from it’s index. In addition to denying the *&%# person who bought my domain all the traffic I had built to videolicio.us, I removed that competition for my new domain.
XML Sitemap Submissions
The next step was to submit my updated sitemap to the major search engines. This is a straightforward process. You’ll just need an active account for Google Webmaster tools, Yahoo Site Explorer, and Live Search Webmaster Center. Just follow the instructions for the respective engines.
For Ask.com, you’ll need to ping them by appending the entire URL to your sitemap onto their submission URL, like so:
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
Replace the part in bold with the address to your sitemap, then hit enter. Ask.com will tell you if the ping was successful.
That starts the process of the search engines crawling my new site and seeding the pages therein.
The e-Strategy Academy covers all aspects of digital marketing including search optimization & marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, video marketing, mobile marketing & public relations.