Google analytics & Site Map

They aren't going to do much in the way of actually driving traffic to your shop. Google Sitemap will help you get indexed faster, which theoretically might mean a few more visists sooner, but the difference is negligible.

A lot of people do like them for looking at site data, though. I haven't had a chance to use them yet myself.

Exactly, Google Analitics is a tool to track stats of visits and page views. Very powerful tool, by the way. But no it's not going to bring you any traffic whatsoever.

As far as Google Sitemaps, (btw there's same thing for Yahoo that I use) is not going to bring any quick results too. It might take weeks before your site will be actually indexed according to your sitemap.

farennikov said:

Google Analitics is a tool to track stats of visits and page views. Very powerful tool, by the way. But no it's not going to bring you any traffic whatsoever.

As far as Google Sitemaps, (btw there's same thing for Yahoo that I use) is not going to bring any quick results too. It might take weeks before your site will be actually indexed according to your sitemap.

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It does NOT hurt to get involved with Google Tools and Beta Programs, for new sites it may even help you understand and learn lots of stuff.

I'd be a bit weary about Google Sitemap. I work with an SEO consultant for my day job and he says sometimes if you forget pages in your sitemap that are currently getting indexed, they'll actually pull them out of the index and only use the ones in your sitemap. So if you have a big site, w/ lots of pages, you could lose some if you don't include them. There's also some other weird buggy things and alot of the data is inaccurate (supposedly). I use it w/ a grain of salt.

Heather

mnchknlady said:

I work with an SEO consultant for my day job and he says sometimes if you forget pages in your sitemap that are currently getting indexed, they'll actually pull them out of the index and only use the ones in your sitemap. So if you have a big site, w/ lots of pages, you could lose some if you don't include them

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Thanks for sharing that, Heather. I was thinking of using sitemaps for the forums, but now I'm not so sure.

They have an automated process so it grabs everything from the database, but I sort of like the "natural" process of things

It's pretty easy to build a good sitemap though.
I wrote my own sitemap scripts, they basically go through directories where I have static files and build their lists + list all the dinamic content (i.e. posts) from DB. It's really easy.

It's pretty easy to build a good sitemap though.

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Easy for someone with technical knowledge, for sure Maybe not easy for all t-shirt merchants or someone with no background in that area.

I've tried writing scripts before from scratch, and it sure wasn't easy