I haven’t been involved in marketing a website for a very long time. Although my team does develop websites in my current line of work, they are either non-search-engine important, or the marketing aspect is, well handled by the Marketing department.

But since I relaunched this website, I was looking into ways to promote it, so I started reading into search engine placements again, which I was very much into when I was running multiple top fan sites. First place I looked was obviously Google. In poking around, they now have an offering called Sitemaps. It’s essentially a push mechanism to get things into their engine instead of the usual poll model of a search engine. Reading into the discussion groups, it seems it’s definitely not perfected yet and some seem to claim it actually drops their page rankings.

However, since I am eager to get my new site indexed/ranked, I didn’t really care if it did blow away my old cached index. I really hope to be ranked #1 (or at least #2), when someone types in “ray yu” as a search term. I mean, the dang domain name is “rayyu”, it should rank better than some other Ray Yu’s profile on Flickr. No offense to him though, since he does have cool pictures.

I looked briefly into the Sitemap Generator by Google and it’s just so many steps. So I tried to find if there’s a plugin for generating the sitemap automatically from this b2evolution blog. The official listing for such a plugin/hack has a broken link, so I turned to the forums. Fortunately, someone else has written another code snippet for doing so and it worked like a charm. I am glad I found a little code snippet that does it all for me, and dynamically.

In any case, we shall see how well this turns out Google hasn’t visited rayyu.com since last December. Let’s see when it will arive next!